See also: IRC log
jeff jaffe: welcome to all of you
... as we explore the combination, we chose our most full-throttled tech
conference to introduce this idea
... 3.5 years ago, when there was the first joint conference
... we started to talk about a vision of publishing = web
... I never imagined that we would conclude so quickly that there was so
much we could do together
... I'm looking forward to us working together
Markus Gylling: the first session is about
the epub 3 roadmap
... we assume you know about epub
... this is not epub 101
... but more about next steps in light of discussions about the
combination
... we have four panelists
... introductions
Paul Belfanti: VP of content for ascend learning
rick johnson: vital source
tzviya Siegman: wiley
billk: apex
Tzviya Siegman: i co-chair the epub 3.1 wg
and the DPUB IG
... I'm going to talk about epub 3.1, how we got there, and where we are
going
... history of idpf
... standards org from 1999 as open ebook forum
... lots of members from pubs, and ecosystem
... we promote epub as interoperable delivery format based on owp
... [shows timeline]
... epub3 in 2012, and then fixed layout for childrens books, manga, etc
... 2013, when adoption was slow because of changes
... we worked with BISG to create epubtest.org to test feature support
... and to publicly shame reading systems that don't support all of the
spec
... in 2014, we worked on a profile of epub, epub for education
... did 3.0.1 update, which was a bit more than bug fixes
... in 2015, we started working on epub 3.1
... it's currently in a public draft
... sortof like last call at w3c
... we're collecting feedback
... next step is IP review
... goal is final by end of calendar year
... we originally wanted a larger change
... but we pulled back on new features due to impending combination
... BFF had lots of overlap with PWP, so we put it on ice
... we had hoped to allow html serialization, but that too was put on
hold
... we did get rid of some unused, frustrating features
... lots of editorial changes to make the documents more user-friendly
... we've also created an a11y spec
... you can evaluate and certify for a11y
... you can discover a11y features of a given epub
... based on wcag 2.0
... but there are some differences, for example navigating between html
files in epub
... same high-level principles as wcag, we hope this stuff eventually
migrates to wcag
... how's global adoption going?
... lots of reading system support
Daniel Glazman: where's BlueGriffon?!?
Tzviya Siegman: here's a list of those that
support epub3
... we have epubcheck
... our community takes validation *very* seriously
... retailers WONT allow files that fail epubcheck
... we do need help maintaining epubcheck
... epubtest.org keeps reading systems honest
... I'm a volunteer tester, but reading systems can also test themselves
... there are EPUB 3 authoring tools, from Indesign to google docs
... epub3 has been holistically adopted in Japan
Bill McCoy: it's a national standard in
South Korea
... widely adopted for trade books, manga, educationtzviya
Tzviya Siegman: timeline
... epub 3.1 at end of 2016
... current proposal is for an EPUB 3 Community Group to work on 3.1
maintenance
Markus Gylling: let's save questions for the end
Rick Johnson: it's an understatement to say
it's popular in education
... I'm from VitalSource
... we do a *lot* of business in education
... 18 million textbooks
... we're involved in the WG
... we do creation tools, integration tools, analytics, learning
process, reading systems
... broad content support. Ingram is our partner, we work with 58,000
imprints
... we support lots of formats, but we love EPUB
... it's because of mobile devices
... students love mobile devices, need content that reflows and is
accessible
... they like highly interactive web sites, made into books via epub
... a year ago, five of our top 100 titles were epub
... now two-thirds of our top 100 are epub, PDF is now a backlist format
... epub reading is mostly in the browser
... and a lot of the usage is offline
... and epub is great for that
... we also do content creation
... we have our own tool focused on making it simple for
students/faculty to create content, born accessible
... it's all wcag AA conformant
... EPUB is not a future tech, it's a fact in the marketplace
... it's a best practice for getting web tech into the education
marketplace
Markus Gylling: thanks Rick!
Paul Belfanti: I'm going to talk about epub
for education spec
... why did we create this?
... there was a logjam in the industry
... the overhead was too high, too many variants of the file format
... you'd have to create 15 versions of every epub for the various
channels
... and features were missing
... the development costs were high
... and there wasn't enough content.
... it was a vicious cycle.
... from a publisher standpoint, a standard format gives you
... economies of scale
... sourcing flexibility
... consistency
... reduces overhead
... you can focus on product enhancements
... for the platform provider
... more volume of content
... for the educator
... content can integrate with LMS
... easily repurposed, trackable
... easily deployed
... for the learner, it's more responsive
... has richer experiences leading to better outcomes
... can be used anywhere, inside or outside classroom
... will get more affordable
... what is the edupub alliance?
... a group of like-minded organizations
... driven by IDPF, IMS Global, W3C, BISG
... pooled resources for a common goal
... a lightweight structure based on existing standards
... EDUPUB = Open Web Standards + Learning management + ???
... it includes everything that the context needs for education
... integrate IMS, allow annotations, interactivity
... has an education-tuned semantic vocabulary to describe these complex
structures
... aligned with readium to help implementation
... interactivity, connectivity, complex design, and a11y
... it's a global alliance
... the first workshop included more than 100 people, from china,
brazil, europe, all over the globe
... different regions have different needs... learning styles, layout
requirements, horizontal vs vertical
... where do we go from here?
... epub for edu is somewhat on hold in spec development because of 3.1
... focusing on implementations
... spec is in public draft
... will meet in February 2017 to do status check and work on next steps
Bill_Kasdorf: I'm shocked that my colleagues
have not gone over time :)
... BISG is the book industry study group
... we represent the entire supply chain, not just publishers
... historically more trade-oriented
... aggregators, tech companies, retailers, service providers
... we're not an advocacy organization like AAP
... BISG was an early supporter of EPUB
... we work hand-in-hand with IDPF to promote EPUB
... it's not just books (everyone drink)
... we have a reciprocal membership with w3c and IDPF
... we put together working groups that work on publications to help
encourage implementation and adoption
... talking about edupub
... so paul chaired a bisg group to write "Getting Started with EDUPUB"
... to help people get started
... it's due for an update now
... we did a quickstart guide to accessible publishing
... it's gotten incredible attention and update, partly due to our
friends from vital source
... got it translated into many languages
... a big priority for BISG is a11y
... many people in the room helped drive this
... it's 70 pages long, but the quickstart part is 20 pages
... if you have a properly created epub3, you're already 90 percent of
the way to accessibility
... i also want to mention epubtest.org
... it's a collaboration between BISG, IDPF, and DAISY
... DAISY did the heavy lifting
... aimed at the misconception that epub3 was not getting adopted
... it was, but not every feature
... so we needed to see which RSs supported a particular feature
(showing epubtest.org on screen)
<Ralph> http://epubtest.org/
Bill Kasdorf: lots of pubs don't distribute
to the retail supply chain
... it's easy to use, nice interface with lots of details about feature
support
... and there's now testing for a11y support
... which is more complex due to interactions of reading system, AT, and
operating system
... so this information is based on knowledgeable users reporting on
tests
... this is useful for procuring tech for schools
Markus Gylling: four minutes for questions
Laurent Le Meurs: what is the relationship between epubtest and epubcheck?
Bill_Kasdorf: epubtest is about the reading
system
... epubcheck is about the epub file
Bill McCoy: there are also actual test files on github
Bill Kasdorf: this is useful for reading system devs
Markus Gylling: epubtest test suite is
manual tests
... that's why it's expensive and painful to run
... epub reading systems don't have a standard api, unlike browsers, so
we can't do automated testing
Tzviya Siegman: please help out
George: the a11y test book does a great job, but we will add more titles to check math and advanced features
Bill_Kasdorf: everything we've talked about is a work in progress
Markus Gylling: more questions? we have
thirty seconds.
... let's switch the people
(applause)
ivan: I try to be bolder than markus, and
ask panelists to be short
... I expect questions
... this session is more about future work, future directions
... after the combination is done
... just to indicate how flexible things are, what we were calling pwp
may even change it's name
... this is movable ground
... the idea is to give an overview of where we want to go
... i will begin with markus, who was one of the instigators
... garth is the latest addition to the co-chair list
... tzviya is the stable point
... and bill moves everything behind the scenes
Bill McCoy: I'm the unstable point
Ivan Herman: Markus will talk about background
Markus Gylling: jeff mentioned the initial
workshop in february 2013 in NYC
... the interest group was created six months later
... initially, the scope and ambition was exploratory to understand the
landscape
... to make the connection between OWP and the ebook industry more
direct
... there has always been some distance between owp and portable doc
formats
... we wanted to understand the gaps
... which problems have been solved, which haven't
... the first 2 years were in this mode
... we did research, we published reports
... some are ongoing projects
... Dave Cramer has requirements for text layout doc
... and a CSS priorities doc
... we did a gap analysis of wcag 2.0
... we did use cases for annotations for dpub
... the initial explorative mode has changed to working on PWP
... now we're looking more pragmaticallly to that future
... so the IG can provide the fodder needed by a new working group
within w3c
... we've been working on use cases since the dawn of time
Garth Conboy: Co-chair of PWP Interest Group
Tzviya Siegman: you just renamed it!
Garth Conboy: Sorry, Digital Publishing
Interest Group!
... and Chairman of the Board of IDPF
... I am either persistent or stubborn in this space
... I started in 1999…when just a few companies were doing this
... we were hunting around with NY publishers to find content
... it dawned on us to have publishers deliver a new format was not
workable
... this lead to open ebook format which then led to IDPF and EPUB
... but even then it was based on Web technologies
... there was HTML and some CSS
... we did a package and a manifest
... This has been moving for quite some time to get to EPUB3.1
... move from @ world to where we are now
... We don't do our best when we invent from whole cloth
... exception is the EPUB package file
... Other things we invented from whole cloth but were not as successful
... as we brought in more and more stuff from the Web
... and we have been continuing in that direction
... as we consider a potential merger, with DPub group
... I will let Tzviya talk to that group more because she has much more
history than I
... As we look at what a Portable Web Publication is
... there is a list of capabilities of what a PWP can be
... it's wholly contained, packaged, layer of technologies being used
... based on OWP
... and there has been a bit of tensions
... as we published our use cases recently
... between the browser community and the browser community
... EPUB has always been this zipped thing; never really existed as a
Web site
... some tension with browsers and we want to render this natively
... has been this zip file
... what feels like an interesting
... what Ivan would say was a "kumbaya moment"
... on Tuesday [Bill clarified]
... whether P stands for portable or packaged is unclear
... but a lot of agreement is publications
... maybe packaged file gets into more Web manifest
<boris_anthony> Layers that Garth refered to:
<boris_anthony> portable
<boris_anthony> bounded package of media
<boris_anthony> in web-standard formats
<boris_anthony> addressable by standard Web protocols
<boris_anthony> and consumable by standard Web tools.
Garth Conboy: a lot of interesting technologies at W3C
Garth Conboy: Dave working on interesting
things
... Hope this will be publsihed on web, can be viewed online
... whether single or multiple
... maybe larger value than one
... one would be closely related to where we are with EPUB today
... where we have a whole industry
... We have to find a path to move this forward, the PWP into the Web
world
... Earlier there was the browser friendly format that we decided not to
move forward
... in order to bring it to the PWP effort
... I was a late comer to that
... think about how to round trip it
... Dave not throwing things at me
... There were experiements of taking packaging into HTML
... will serve us well
... But I will be the stick in the mud that we have to support the
existing industry
... now Tzviya can talk
Tzviya Siegman: Garth picks things up
quickly
... I'll give a brief background on the use cases
... It's not covert, but we have been laying the groundwork for a
Working Group
... we need more information about what we need to do
... We have put together this use case document that we new we needed to
do
... what we did was intentionally agnostic about the kinds of
technologies we would be using
... In the last two weeks
Ivan; one week
Tzviya Siegman: seems like two
... in the past amount of time we have had a number of comments that
"all of this technology exists" so use it
... one of members of groups said, look at WebApp manifest, look at
Service Workers
... last TPAC we spoke with Jake Archibald
... on his way home he built a crude system based on Service Workers
... Dave took it and build a crude system based on Service workers
... there is a Moby Dick book in there and a Bible
... files that a bit different from what Web world knows
... they need to be first class citizens
... Remember MathML…it needs to function
... We need to bring publications to same level of respect and support
as other HTML documents
... We need to figure out what this means in the world of service
workers, web app manifests
... on this year's, next year's and three years' from now's Web
... Looks like we are headed in the right direction
... Sometimes we use different words or terms that are different from
the people in eWeb platforms group
... I may call package that someone else calls off the web
... we have a lot of work to do, but the direction we are headed in is
something like a Web publication
... that I can just open in a Web browser
... There is a conference called Books and Browsers
... I want to be able to open my book in a browser
... But opening offline is very important to our industry
... I need to be able to take my book and read whenever I want
... whether in a plane or library
... I need to be able to do whatever I want
... We have to figure this out and be able to work together
... We have a lot of work ahead of us and get to that "kumbaya moment"
Bill McCoy: I am going to talk about the people issues and the risks and what we have to be fearful of
Bill McCoy: and not talk about technical
solutions
... I am very interested in future solutions and technology
... but today I want to talk about the people side
... To get to the Nirvhana that Tzviya talked about
... where end users can publish easily to the Web
... and big corporations can publish to Web for online and offline
distributions
... and it's all Nirvanna
... Thanks to the publishing industry engagement
... other parts of the Web will advance more rapidly
... like Web payments, IoT, Accessibility
... that is the Paradise we want to get to
... but it's not going to happen quickly
... this seamless online/offline may not happen
... tech standards work is slow
Bill McCoy: some publishing industry people
are not aware of what is going on
... we have risk for disappointment
... we think we are going after paradise
... but we are slogging along to achieve some minor things
... but it's totally worthwhile
... the fact that Nirvanna won't happen
... don't mistake a clear view for a short distance
... this is not going to be a short distance
... We should be very happy if in the next two years
... my slides today are hand coded HTML
Bill McCoy: if we can take some incremental
steps
... for publications on the Web
... and tell if a browser supports MathML
... and bridge gap between accessible content or not
... make things closer to online world
... without achieving the 'grand unified theory' like Einstein who did
not achieve that
... we can approach
... we are on the low slope of the asotope
... I want to encourage us all to be wary of reject shock
... that people from publishing industries come in and feel they cannot
do it
... W3C understands concepts of "bikeshedding' and "not invented here"
... but EPUB people may like a paint color and want not to change
... we need to drink beer together and it's going to take years
<Ralph> [ -> http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bikeshedding "bikeshedding" ]
Bill Coy: but we have to recognize it's
going to take some head butting and challenges
... but we will work towards this Kumbaya
Daniel Glazman: One of greatest things from
the IDPF-W3C merger is the investment of browsers into the W3C groups
... and more importantly the investment of the publishers into the W3C
groups
... companies are not always interested in the "minor" uses of the Web
... may not be interesting for them to follow
... a "dinosaur" of the past
... if you can join these groups like Web Platform that are interesting
for publications
... then you will have much greater weight
<astearns> setting the expectation at incremental improvement is immensely important
Daniel Glazman: if you are not there, it
will be harder for us
... liaising is good for two different standards bodies
... but post merger you have to be everywhere
<tzviya> +1
Daniel Glazman: if EPUB is successful it will have to come into W3C
Tzviya Siegman: I agree
Leonard Rosenthol: The title of the panel
does not reflect discussion
... group has focused on publications
... how do you focus on publications and documents in that scope
... you talked about the outreach to global publishers
... and what about outreach to the global publishers of documents
Bill McCoy: you are right
... I tried to explain there are many publishing industries
... I tend to avoid document in W3C land that we tend to get shackled
with
... I want to make different version from Dave Cramer's
... with soccer schedules and different things from PDF land
... I laughed yesterday after the mad scramble yesterday, it took hours
for the schedule to get up on the Web
... even at the W3C
... whereas if someone had just put up a PDF it would have taken 10
minutes
... we need to make it easier and to democratize
... I am excited about discussion from Tuesday about descoping
... we need to be very careful
... just because big publishers are joining
... communication and publishing is a grassroots thing
... and we cannot be driven only by commercial and book publishers
Garth Conboy: I think it's a terminology
issue
... I do say publications all the time
... I think that documents, books are children of publications
... an example, no one is going to write Moby Dick in Google docs
... they are going to write a newsletter or in InDesign
... that has expect in EPUB
... smaller things in Google docs which has export to EPUB
Bill McCoy: Wiley and Random House don't care
Tzviya Siegman: We do care; our authors
write in whatever format they want
... we care about documents, but people will do whatever they want
... Dave reminds me I cannot tell James Patterson how to write
... People tell us it's too hard to work on EPUB
... To quote Tim from last night, we have to keep things simple
... Whatever we create, it has to be easy to do this
... If it's easy, then people will write their schedules or Moby Dick or
their Nobel winning papers in this format
... and maybe Math will be part of it
Bill McCoy: If the word publisher is out of
picture and you are just an author
... kids' soccer letter just has an 'author'
... the use case of 'author equals publisher' cannot be in the back
Ivan Herman: other questions
Steve Zilles: I like the notion of a browser
friendly format that is off-lineable
... when you have a package it is relatively easy to ensure security of
the package
... We are living in a world where everyone is trying to break into your
system, especially if it's an active device
... how do you see providing protection to these "BFFs"
... Browser friendly formats
Bill McCoy: we are not going to reinvent the Web security model, as Mike Smith said
Leonard Rosenthol: Mike and I keep
challenging that
... not reinvent Web Security model
... I agree, but it needs to be extended
Bill McCoy: Steve was talking about
unpackaged case
... in packaged case we have it solved
... but we need to think about that more
Leonard Rosenthol: What PDF and EPUB do is
not comparable with the Web security model
... if we want on and off web security, we have to maintain that model
... it's a model people understand and it's standardized in W3C
... It's absolutely TBD and we need to spend time on this
Garth Conboy: with protesters not there now,
there is encryption and security around that
... which gets you walled gardens that are bad for end users of the
content
... it's unclear whether these efforts are going to be steps towards
resolving these problems
... there is room for evolution
Bill McCoy: important point we glossed over
... that should be done from the top down
... we have this packaged thing
... have to do work from bottom up and top down
... what is the minimum to do from the online world
Rick Johnson: We have two relatively mature
industries coming together with many assumptions
... we'll have to unpack these and not put stakes in the ground now
... have to keep working on these
Bill Kasdorf: I have spoken about
convergence
... it means both sides have value and both sides have to move
... how much we take for granted
... in EPUB children's books
... behind that is technology that came out years ago
... like accessibility
George Kerscher: that was from W3C
Bill Kasdorf: now the publishing community
is not thinking about accessibility we just do SMIL
... another obvious example is Flash
... we don't need it now
... but a few years ago that's all publishers used
... Real publishers is getting us toward that Nirvanna; we are getting
those bits and pieces
Daniel Glazman: there is an area of
difference between IDPF and W3C that is mentioned but not often enough
... because it is going to hit us quite fast
... and that is testing
Ivan Herman: We did discuss
Daniel Glazman: ok, but Testing takes a lot
of time and energy
... who is going to discuss it and how
... it is going to be a pain
Ivan Herman: we started to discuss this on
Tuesday afternoon
... this has to be discussed in the WG
... in an IG it is premature
... but we will need to put that as part of WG
Daniel Glazman: there is a corollary
question
... maintain 3.1
... but what is going to happen to testing?
... we have to work together
Ivan Herman: I think this will be part of the details
Ivan Herman: when the discussions continue
between the two organizations
... testing has to be taken over as part of the maintenance at W3C
Bill McCoy: some of this is insufficient in
terms of W3C standards
... bringing these things together is not going to be easy
... like bringing together people from France and England
... this WG focus is not clear yet
... cannot imagine it as a clean hand-over
... premature for the unified roadmap
... but it must include testing
Luc Audrain: we have to keep in mind
... we are some here from the publishing industry but we are very few
... book publishing has hundreds of years of history and quality
... there is no roadmap for future
... we are aware of OWP and standards
... for digital publishing
... we achieved digpub with EPUB
... I am afraid that not many people in the publishing industry are
aware of the challenges and what is at stake with this merging
Luc Audrain: it's important to keep in mind
... we are willing to go
... to transform this industry
... not only in terms of marketing but also in terms of techniques to
create and to bring the author's ideas to the market
Ivan Herman: Shall we take a break?
Garth Conboy: thank you for this discussion
George Kerscher: president of IDPF and member of the DPIG
Judy Brewer: director of web accessibility initiative of W3C
Charles LaPierre: tech lead fro born a18y at benetech and chair of a18y documents
George Kerscher: preparing this presentation
for 20 years (or longer).
... back in the 80's there was movement towards dig books in a18y
community.
... working with SGML folks which morphed towards HTML 1.0
... the blind community was supported by libraries and it "simply"
needed to transition to digital (from analog)
... lots happeend before eBooks in '99
... same people also were excited in web a18y as well - '97
... I was asked to help steer the web a18y back then
... and that was part of why DAISY chose the web technology, becaus
there was already a connection
... I believe that web a18y was always guiding the IDPF work
... moving fwd to when EPUB 3.1 work started, there was an oppt to start
a specific doc around EPUB & A18y
... Avneesh and Charles chair that
... there was also a piece of work around WCAG and electronic publishing
Charles LaPierre: wht we wanted to do was
find gaps in WCAG that weren't covered in DigiPub
... went through all techniques and found holes that DAISY had most
addressed, especially around skippability, etc.
... needed to shine spotlight on these gaps
... also found other areas such as annotations, positioning, etc. that
are already being worked on
... but things like Math are kicking off in new groups
... and then put these things into the guidelines and a Note was
published
George Kerscher: conformance side, heard
from many others about epubtest.org for conformance of RS
... on a18y, but creating a test book with no errors that could be used
to eval the RS on a18y
... 32 evaluations so far on RS+AT (eg. NVDA + ADE)
... but we did with the EPUB A18y spec, was to use WCAG (no new wheels!)
but add new success criteria
... this is a public spec for all of EPUB, not just 3.1
... in terms of conformance, Charles tell us about metadata and how
we're using it
Charles LaPierre: in our guidleines, we have
discoverability enabled publications
... in collaboration with schema.org
... additional metadata per publication that enables discoverability of
a18y features (or hazards) on a given publication
... eg textual, visual, auditory, tactile, etc.
... a textbook with a few images with no alt=text, would require a
visual and textual to consume it. BUT if there was alt-text, textual
only is fine
... also have metadata that enables 3rd parties to claim conformance to
XXXX standard (and what version of same)
... and who did the certification (if any)
... there is also a summary (human readable) about a18y
George Kerscher: AccessModeSufficient - if
you have text, that means it can xformed to text->speech, to braille,
etc.
... if you have that, you can probably access all the content in just
about any AT method
... certification metadata is again about making a claim. You MUST it to
claim it - either by publisher or 3rd party
... this enables market to determine what is accessible and what is not
... very use for EDU
... this is all work that was done before
Judy Brewer: I am speaking to people from
IDPF to fill you in on W3C work
... even though we've been doing a18y together for a while
... please reach out to me if you have stuff you'd like to address in
a18y or publishing (myself or other staff)
... W3C is a vendor neutral consortium to develop standards for the web
- "Web for All"
... Open Web Platform (based on HTML5), including A18y as a core
component
... so that every spec is reviewed for a18y considerations
... Web Accessibility Initiative has been around for a long time.
currently undergoing reorg to distribute the work
... cross-disability and aging, cross-technology concerns, development
of specs, education, etc.
... web a18y including vision, hearing, motor, speech, cognitive and
much more...
... publishing is not visual but its many more such as cognitive,
learning, motor, etc.
... there has been a series of pub & a18y efforts already
... and looking forward to building even more, especially for things
such as ARIA
... WCAG is a document that is considered a core standard world wide
... not just for the web
... content should be percievable, operable, understandable and robust
... one of the big items on WCAG is that is has a layered design so that
below those key things there are guidelines towards make them happen
... and there are tons of great examples we've already done
... and then you finally have success criteria that define if you have
actually achieved your goals
... and most of them are technology neutral since the techniques are
per-technology
... "you can use WCAG to make anything accessible"
... some current work in a18y at W3C
... update to WCAG 2.0 with expanded coverage in cognitive and low
vision
... ATAG and UAAG completed in 2015
... exploring needs for a possible WCAG 3.0 in a future
... also looking into authoring tool a18y for producing a18y content AND
how to do any authoring accessibly
... there is a bunch of conformance testing around WCAG 2.
... human expert tests, semi-automated tests and fully automated tests
... work going on in a CG around even more automated testing
... that is now a TF in the WCAG group to work on an actual test harness
and procedures
... then see if we can move some semi-autos into autos using the new
framework
... name is "Accessibility Conformance Testing" TF
... WCAG 2 has a LOT of supporting education materials understanding to
what it is, why we have it, how to implement it, etc
... also many 3rd parties with materials as well has all the material
you will need
George Kerscher: in the appendix there is
additional support references that point to W3
... DAISY was given a grant by Google to make a impact
... establish a baseline of accessibility and then build tools for
testing and compliance
... first step was the EPUB A18y spec, and that is the baseline (WCAG A,
AA or AAA)
... plus you have to add a variety of other items for DigPub
... since everything can't be quantified, there will be a process
document about how to evaluate context
... and software woud help people follow that process
... Avneesh and Raman are both here and part of the TF
... on a short timeframe in advance of the ACT TF
Judy Brewer: in transition between CG->WG, so peple have a perfect opp to sign up
George Kerscher: open for Q & A
... we know that the publishers want a "good housekeeping seal" on their
documents and schools want to searh on that
... but can't do it now!
... biggest impact is the baseline and declaration of support
Charles LaPierre: the whole supply chain is
critical in ensuring the A18y - from author to publisher to aggregator
to ...
... they all need to make sure that al the tools are a18y aware ad dont
damage the content
George Kerscher: having that statement is a huge start
Avneesh Singh: it is beautiful to see that
the combination of the work between IDPF and WCAG is a great thing
... but what is the path forward for such metadata in the web?
Charles LaPierre: in the guidelines (2.4), there is support for things such as TOC, navigation, etc.
Judy Brewer: not sure there is a gap but
there is a team doing the gap identification (@tzviya?)
... but it should be possible to add new tehniques as we go forward as
they are identified
... either 2.x or Silver (3.0)
... but the timing is great to get this all working
Tzviya Siegman: get involved!
Charles LaPierrre: page numbers are a big
issue and there may not be a print equivalent to which you need to
match. but with more born digital, that maynot be true.
... and if there wasn't a print equiv, you probably want something else
for navigation
Judy Brewer: different technology paradigms
are going to be a big issue as the grups come together - pages (and
their numbers) are a good example.
... you will probably need to educate this community about your needs
... and let them know why they are important
three topics: CSS work/Houdini, Web payments, web fonts
Alan Stearns: motivation for Houdini... I'm not a publisher or designer; my motivation is making tools for them to express what they want
When I started with dtp at Aldus it was a toy technology in terms of its functionality, but had clear benefits already.
The output was laughably inept.
It got better. We moved from a toy basis to a mostly-annoying phase.
You had to do a lot of manual teaking.
I think we emerged around 2001 or so, after several iterations of [Adobe] InDesign, when the new tools were better in every respect than what they replaced.
But by then there was a new technology, the Web.
It was interesting to be able to get things on people's screens, but what they were seeing was... inept. It has got better.
Now we're well into the "annoying" phase for the Web. You can get what you want, but there's so much tweaking, from a designer's perspective, to get where you want.
Since the Web relies on browsers, you now longer have access to the manual tweaking; you have to use CSS hacks and scripting.
I've been involved with the CSS WG trying to build in capabilities that you need in the browser, and also to make the script-based tweaking better.
Now we have flexbox and grid, that the Web never had before; they started before my involvement but I'm making sure they're getting done.
Hyphenation has been a personal crusade of mine and [is happening]. Now I'm working on baseline grids,
something that every other publishing technology has ever had!
And we're adding opentype variation font support.
But there will be tweaking. So in another room today, the Houdini Task Force is meeting to talk about how to expose more of the style infrastructure to scripting.
How to make styling easier to do, or possible to do; first few steps will reduce the coding in e.g. Readium, & to make it run faster.
Maybe also you can do things like baseline grids in scripting with Houdini - can't today at all.
I need all of your help.
I need the people in your organizations who are wrestling with the Web's current annoyances.
The people coming up with CSS hacks. The developers writing JS to get things done.
I need you to come to the CSS WG, to Houdini. We need to feel your pain.
We now have custom properties, so e.g if epub needed a new property, the browsers will keep it, and Houdini is working on letting you say whether the property is inherited, the ability to validate the values. Also working on
Alan Stearns: the typed object model [OM]. Getting/setting values involves a lot of string code today; with typed OM the values will work natively.
[Ian Jacobs enters the room to talk about Web Payments]
Ian Jacobs: the Web Payments IG seeks to make payments easier and more secure at checkout.
Looking for standards opportunities, regulatory concerns, liaison, but focus is checkout.
The first aspect is enhancing the browser to it helps the users make payments more quickly.
The second aspect is Payment Apps.
A person goes to an online store and pressed a Buy button.
browser asks merchant what's accepted [visa and mastercard, say]
(API is intended to help solve "Nascar problem" where there are too many logos.)
So the browser now turns to the payment app. User has registered credit/debit cards with the browser.
user picks a card, browser sends detail via payment app [scribe uncertain here]
The web payments IG hopes this will make web payments easier.
The API also has a "matchmaker" protocol via inter-ledger payments - you'd just say how you want to pay, not see what the merchant prefers.
Can fall back to classical checkout procedures.
Bill Kasdorf: so the merchant no longer needs to keep a record of my credit card number
Ian Jacobs: I want to distinguish payment credentials from identity of the person shopping. Many sites will still want to retain a customer relationsip.
Merchants don't want a customer card number. They use e.g. braintree to take the liability.
Bill McCoy: some large merchants want this information. How will that affect things?
Ian Jacobs: merchants may not want the credit cards. E.g. uber uses braintree.
one way for cenvenience is local (browser) storage rather than e.g. Amazon or Google storing the card.
q: so where does the liability and privacy end?
Ian Jacobs: so eg. https will help. But there are some interesting questions about who responsible for what.
Payment apps will have some responsibility. E.g. you get an app from yuor bank and they want to know it's you
So they might use Web authentication (another Working Group's product).
Avneesh Singh: I was in a meeting, analyzing why epub not picking up in Asia.
The Asian countries are not on the online payment mode.
Maybe the payment is added to the user's 'phone bill. Is this flexible enough to support this?
Ian Jacobs: great question! I talked about the bigger picture - there are lots of different payment methods, and we're trying to understand about real payment methods in practice.
We've separated the payment method from the user experience.
We've made a standard process, we mentioned credit cards & bitcoin but there can be lots of others. So yes it's a goal to be very flexible & we're trying to work with others & confirm that flexibility.
You mentioned carrier billing, a broader question. E.g. my payment app from my phone company would support the payment method, and when the merchant that accepts taht & I have an app for it there's a match & it works
<Karen> Liam Quin: I know from working from working with NACS
<Karen> …in practice a small merchant is not allowed to keep a customers' Visa number
<Karen> ..but they lie to Visa
<Karen> …if you run a convenience store with a filling station
<Karen> …every now and then someone will drive off without paying
<Karen> …or someone will use a stolen card
<Karen> …your system needs to supports this unusual use case
Ian Jacobs: merchants make a business decision whether to use old system, but could still do it.
[Chris Lilley introduces Fonts]
Originally Web used Platform Fonts, system-specific
Then there was basic font download.
[shows opentype ligatures, opentype features]
Chris: example - font-varant-numerc: oldstyle/lining numbers, for whether digits are lower-case or upper-case.
Another example - fractions
using diagonal-fractions feature.
e.g for 13/27
proportional vs fixed-width digits
[shows discretionary ligatures]
[shows font-synthesis to tell the browser whether to fake bold or slanted fonts if not available]
[font-kerning and letter-spacing] "normal" turns kerning on.
kerning is for specific pairs of characters, letterspacing is for all characters.
Woff is a font-specific compression for browsers.
Woff2 makes more use of font-specific compression techniques, e.g. not transmitting a bounding box when it can be calculated.
woff 2 fonts tend to average about 32% of the size of the original font; woff 1 were 45% of the size.
On mobile, the last 2% size gains uses too much CPU to decompress, duobles decode time!
[colour fonts for illuminated manuscripts... or actually for emoji]
example: tradition of hand-painted signage in India Painter Kafeel. Shows using CSS to change the colours in an SVG colour font in firefox & edge. Coming to the Chrome browser.
Opentype 1.8 arrived last week with font variations, like multiple masters or GX.
Download one font and get five diffrent weights, condensed and wide version, optical size, slant, etc, so big change.
font can have custom axes too.
Ralph: [thanks Chris]
<dauwhe> link to Dave Cramer slides: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2016Sep/0004.html
Dave Cramer: HBG has produced over 1,000 titles as HTML + CSS = PDF
. . . and sold over 50,000,000 print books done this way,
Florian Rivoal: The Web is the universal medium, for
everyone, for every culture.
Liam Quin: We closed the XML WG
... There is built in support for spreads, column spreads,
... These are things that don't exist in CSS. Can be done with vendor
extensions We are trying to fill the gaps and are working to standardize
some of the things needed for books.
Liam Quin: There are some schools that teach
XSL for publishers
... not many (any?) that teach CSS for publishers
... My goal is to help make CSS fill the needs of publishers
... We do not need to take everything that FO does, but there are
aspects from it to move into CSS.
... We also need to take the needs of self-publishing into consideration
... we need to use finishing, such as gilt spines, JDF, etc.
Bill McCoy: How soon can you stop using
formatters, add-ons, etc?
... Are we close to CSS-FO?
Florian Rivoal: There are various tools that
are implemented today. Not all of this is standard, but we are here to
make it standard.
... Specs move slowly, but we are working on them.
Dave Cramer: We have relatively stable specs that have been implemented by the formatters, not the browsers
Ivan Herman: The fact that you do it proves it can be done
Liam Quin: Houdini is opening the browser up
to scripting, which may help with layout
... as these happen in Houdini polyfills
Bill McCoy: And publishers need to particapte more
Liam Quin: File bugs against browsers
Dave Cramer: and a pull request!
Florian Rivoal: and a business case
Alan Stearns: Echoing bill. People have been asking for paginated views for a long time, but we need to convince browsers that there is real demand
Leonard Rosenthol: CSS and the Web push the
envelope when it comes to design
... Have you run into limitations when it comes to print? Has the Web
overtaken print?
Dave Cramer: Yes, people want emojis in print
Florian Rivoal: You can do whatever you want
with pen and paper
... but if you stretch the paper, it looks odd
... CSS is for all sizes, and it works for a range of sizes
Paul Belfanti: The reality is that most publishers don't produce most of their products, so we need to get their vendors involved
Laurent Le Meurs: I'm CTO of EDRLab
Daniel Glazman: I'm from Disruptive
Innovations
... I started working on SGML rendering in 1990
... and lots of other things
Laurent Le Meurs: EDRLab is created by
french publishers, representing 75% of publishing in france
... and SNE
... and French ministry of culture
... we did the EPUB summit in Bordeaux in April
... there will be an EPUB Summit in 2017, location TBD
... we are workiing on Readium LCP
... "user friendly DRM"
... avoid complexity for the user, and will be interoperable,
accessible, and managed by nonprofit
Luc Audrain: books are old citizens
... web does not yet have the typographic excellence that is required
... we now release print and epub at the time time
... we have embraced epub because of the OWP
... what is there today for epub tools, for people who want to create
only digital versions
... why aren't there many tools, unlike for creating websites
Daniel Glazman: my editor is based on gecko
... you can apply any css3/4 features
... you can access manifest/spine/package
... epub2 and epub3
... it is fully internationalized
... thanks to Gecko, so I benefit from web standardization
... we have to cobble together workflows from many pieces
... we have to hand-edit epubs
... ideally I should be able to take the web editor, and add epub
features
... but it's almost impossible
... because of the proprietary XML in epub, and the packaging
... because there's no file api
... I can't paginate in my software
... our goal now is to have a full editorial chain based on epub
... start with epub, you add, you link, you edit, end with epub
... with nothing proprietary, only using pure web tech
... the things we really miss:
... pagination
... pagination is not only for single documents, we need to paginate
multi-document views in one viewport
... footnotes, counters, page numbers should be cross-document
... we should be able to draw on a canvas inside epub
... extend contenteditable
... we need to go far beyond what the front-end web is able to do to
meet the requirements
... of publications
... we should have new tech features never thought of in the web world
Laurent Le Meurs: I want to talk about client side
(network problems means some part of scribing failed)
Laurent Le Meurs: we want to enhance readium
... we're launching readium architecture project
... add new web tech to readium code
... design for readium 2, with big cleaning up of rendering
... turning pages is an issue:
<Bert> Readium
<astearns> readium architecture folks should consult https://drafts.css-houdini.org/css-typed-om/ and http://wicg.github.io/CSS-Parser-API/ and give feedback on whether they would be useful to you
Laurent Le Meurs: css columns, css regions,
css pages, css fragmentation
... all this is difficult
... houdini is not there yet
... we want something better than our columns polyfill
... better typographic compositing
... service workers
... web workers (auto reindexing)
Laurent Le Meurs: file API
... better MathML support
Ivan Herman: unless you incorporate mathjax
Leonard Rosenthol: this session has been
talking about authoring, and even authoring natively
... I'll raise two issues
... one is around a11y
... providing tooling to create a11y content
... the other is responsive design
... providing tools to do that
Daniel Glazman: I first tried to make the UI
of the app a11y
... I'm dealing with ARIA-role
... I kept longdesc
... in terms of responsive design, I support MQ, but you have to write
them yourself
... the next version will have something like Adobe reflow
... you can design MQs visually
<astearns> (also now in DreamWeaver)
<astearns> hmm - and/or perhaps Muse
Daniel Glazman: code will find a way to
insert new mqs
... trying to hide the complexity of responsive design
Luc Audrain: in terms of a11y
... a tool that reads and writes in epub3 may retain designed a11y
... for only digital projects, some requirements (like page numbers)
don't apply
Avneesh Singh: what about accessibility
metadata
... a11y in the tool is one thing, but metadata is of high importance
Luc Audrain: metadata that describes what
features are included?
... that can be derived from the structure of the epub itself in the
tool
George Kerscher: once the epub a11y spec is
approved, we would like to see the authoring tools to enable users to
add a11y metadata
... just like you'd like the user to be able to add alt text when an
image is added
Luc Audrain: it should be possible to
automate some of this
... and also for a11y metadata that's in ONIX
Alan Stearns: you mentioned the readium
architecture reconsiderations
... and that it's too early to rely on houdini stuff
... but it's a perfect time to consider the proposals, determine if they
are useful, and provide feedback
Daniel Glazman: in w3c, a constant complaint
is that we consider web standards from a browsing point of view, and not
the editing view
... this community can really help with that
... publishers are often on the authoring side
... shouldn't a goal be a horizontal editing review
Ivan Herman: if I go back to your first
remark , that we are mostly looking at the end users
... but there are also users who create systems on top of the browser
for other users
... publishers or resellers who build up systems that are catalogs of
books
... what metadata is interesting to be included in a web publication
... much of the metadata is not interesting for the reader, but is
interesting for the distributor
... that aspect should be more vocal in use cases
... the traditional web browser world doesn't care about that
Bill McCoy: this means the web needs to take into account more things