– DRAFT –
Publishing Community Group

wolfgang: welcome to the april meeting of the PCG; we'll start with a recap of the previous meeting

zheng_xu: we're trying something new here, recapping the prior meetings. last meeting, we talked through GitHub issues, primarily issues about EPUB for education and locators
… regarding education, we talked about forming a small group to narrow down use cases, because it's a really wide area of discussion
… regarding locators, we were talking about taking a look at current implementations, and what we still need for locators, to add more use cases to the GH issue so we can start categorizing them

wolfgang: any questions or remarks?

GeorgeK: could you explain the education piece, EPUB in education? because I work in that space all the time, and we're doing presentations at conferences

<zheng_xu> https://github.com/w3c/publishingcg/issues/3

wolfgang: yes, we have an issue in our GH repo, which was from Adam Sobieski... we will be touching on it later on in this meeting... it was a very broad issue, but we discussed talking about complete use cases, narrowly focused, so the last meeting's discussion was to uncover that there are all kinds of things about education, and we want to be more precise about the use cases

GeorgeK: that's great. so there's no connection to the "EPUB for Education" (EDUPUB) profile from years ago?

wolfgang: that's right. we are taking on new ideas, but not tied to the old approach
… ok, next we will talk about work on other task forces
… AvneeshSingh, can you start?

AvneeshSingh: several people have joined the a11y task force to further define requirements around metadata... thanks to all who have contributed... the next step is to update the UX guide for a11y metadata, with motivation to sync with the 1.1 guidelines... we got perspective from users, like EDRlab, and we're waiting for more feedback from other user groups to refine the UX guide...
… we expect the next release to be sometime near the end of this year
… if you are interested in joining the discussion, you're welcome to join the TF

Bill_Kasdorf: a remark... it was a surprise to us that some users are already using free-text metatada... there is no good place to put it in some library discovery services

Michelle: with some of these fields that are newer, software systems don't have it on the roadmap to add to their instances... we have a ton of beautiful metadata, but nowhere to put it, so it can't be found despite the work we're putting into it

GeorgeK: we're developing guidance on using accessibility summary... i think it could be surfaced pretty easily

Michelle: i will be doing more research to see what's available and contributing what i find to the group
… every company has their own product roadmaps with different priorities for the kind of metadata they use, and especially older systems don't have a process for surfacing existing metadata

wolfgang: are there any other questions about a11y or other task forces that want to report?
… sounds like no, so we will move on to the next topic, which is Publishing Manifest
… there are already companies and colleagues using Pub Manifest in different ways
… we wanted to ask anyone who is implementing or has use cases for Pub Manifest, to share

<zheng_xu> mateus: In my work on educational side we have our own epub reader and we started re-engineer

<zheng_xu> ... one key piece is web reading experience with offline support

<zheng_xu> ... we needed to parse opf (xml format) which is difficult. So we are looking to json format publishing manifest

<zheng_xu> ... it has comprehensive boundary for digital book defined in resources so we could cache

<zheng_xu> ... The json format is very easy to parse that helped us providing offline reading support

<zheng_xu> ... also because json-ld could let us easier extend to dictionary

<zheng_xu> ... these thing opf did not let us to do

<zheng_xu> ... we thought it would be a good idea to look at publishing manifest again and standard it again

<zheng_xu> ... pub manifest is also a good resource to generate epub

Bill_Kasdorf: responding specifically about Norton, i think it's fantastic what you're doing... it's an interesting next step for the discussion past the EPUB 3 charter... makes me think of a comment wendyreid made, that what we used to call Web Publications might coexist with EPUB 3, rather than an EPUB 4 that makes EPUB 3 obsolete...
… even thought he ebooks in your platform are EPUB-based, I've actually been thinking of them as EPUB+, since you actually have to simplify them for other platforms

<zheng_xu> mateus: Our flagship product in Norton is more like epub+

<zheng_xu> ... we created a whole pipeline and enhancement around epub

<zheng_xu> ... such as dictionary, image and video embedded into

<zheng_xu> ... we are also into the transition that we could add assessment into book

<zheng_xu> ... for student learning

<zheng_xu> ... all these are still inside epub box but we hope could make it standard

<zheng_xu> ... to including interactive element to reading

wendyreid: this is really cool... i think it tracks back to learning use cases...
… as we approach the end of the EPUB 3 WG and think about what comes next...
… do we work on EPUB 4, or something else? this impresses on us why breaking down use cases is really important...
… it gets to the questions we need to start answering now, such as people who want to build in new features without breaking backward compatibility
… so when we get questions like the ones we get in the CG GH repo, which we cannot do because we can't change EPUB very much, it's stuff like this that we need to understand...
… that's the other part of it—what are users asking for? and how do we translate those to real features in a publishing standard?

<Bill_Kasdorf> Implementations preceding the standard. . . .

wendyreid: with EPUB, we didn't do much user research, we did a lot through wishful thinking...
… and i think focusing on the goals and use cases can help us really inform whether to reopen Pub Manifest, do we look at something else, and what does the future of publishing look like?
… as much as people talk about EPUB 4, the future might not just be EPUB

wolfgang: that's a really important point... we always have to think of our users... to listen to users to get their feedback, so that what we develop and specify is what's in their best interest

GeorgeK: with the user interface to this application, is it similar to a vitalsource or redshelf interface, where you're using the browser? what we do at epubtest.org is we test all the reading systems, and so many have major problems with accessibility...
… does your approach essentially eliminate that problem, and as long as your browser is accessible, does it eliminate the problem?

<zheng_xu> mateus: yes it's right, it's web application and through web browser. We rely on native web browser feature on a11y support

<zheng_xu> ... In norton we also created design system with a11y in mind

<zheng_xu> ... we tried to make a book more accessible so we embed a11y element into our reader

<zheng_xu> ... and we also built UI component to support a11y and we are recommending book component (not just reading component) to support a11y to use the design system

<zheng_xu> Bill_Kasdorf: so we see one common problem

<zheng_xu> ... is moving TOC to a sub chapter but screen reader has issue

<zheng_xu> ... always start from beginning of chapter

<zheng_xu> mateus: one of thing we are trying is to improve user experience for that including proper heading to make it fully accessible

<zheng_xu> GeorgeK: look forward to trying it out

<AvneeshSingh> the issue described by George is due to virtual buffer of screen readers on windows.

wolfgang: zheng, can you talk about your implementation of pub manifest?

zheng_xu: yes, we have been trying to use it on our reader application... one benefit being the parsing being simpler than XML... it was a little difficult to create a book with pub manifest from the start, i had to define a JSON file that is different from what NPM (node package manager) uses, and use that file to compile the publication
… we are using Pub Manifest to convert from EPUB XML to my reading system's data model

wolfgang: thank you, zheng... any other thoughts or remarks? otherwise we will turn to the next topic, which is educational use cases for digital publications
… this is not a new start for EDUPUB, but the idea is that it would make sense for us to get back to use cases for education—what features/functionality are needed for educational users? not in a technical sense, but in the sense of the problems that the education sector are trying to solve...
… we're using the user story template for use cases: user, need, and goal

zheng_xu: i'm not really focused on education, but i am very interested in it because the platform i'm working on allows users to make a book like an application, so users can create their own experiences...
… but it can go really wild, in terms of security, so i am wondering how we can make this kind of experience more standardized
… in education, things like assessment, reading status of the students, etc.
… we should collect use cases for these ideas

sue-neu: i am interested in K-6 experiences, in cases where children might not have access to tech outside of their schools... i would like to work on use cases of that type

wolfgang: that's a very interesting area, a narrower target group... we need to consider these precise groups, otherwise solutions will fail... thank you, this is a really good idea

Bill_Kasdorf: i am very interested in this subject and think it definitely deserves a task force... i would certainly participate... i wouldn't mind reaching out to Paul Belfanti... EDUPUB was his idea in the first place originally... i'm not sure where he is right now, maybe he could join a CG

wolfgang: it does make sense to make contact and organize... and connect to us so that we can have a discussion about forming a task force for education
… you may use any of us three co-chairs to coordinate
… it might be an interesting idea to do a deeper dive into these areas, education and its uses

<Bill_Kasdorf> +1

zheng_xu: a task force for education might be too wide... could we start with a smaller effort to start documenting use cases for younger sectors, for example? then expand to add other use cases

Bill_Kasdorf: i like that idea... it would be easier to recruit the task force when the purpose of the tf would be to start with use cases than a spec

wolfgang: right, it's an opportunity to just collect use cases, and anyone who can contribute can do so, there's no fixed number or goal for how many use cases we need... it would be helpful for all of us to get this information
… we have about 8 minutes left, so maybe we can jump to our last topic, use cases for selectors and locators... we have this idea coming from several places, such as annotations and CFI...

<Michelle_> +1

wolfgang: the idea is to reset and go back and ask "what are the particular use cases?" rather than focusing on the existing solutions

<wendyreid> https://w3c.github.io/epub-specs/epub33/locators/

wendyreid: the epub locators task force already did some of this work... (shared link) we have a list of use cases defined here that focus on use cases that are fairly common, and it touches a bit on education, day-to-day trade reading behaviors, and indexing
… indexing remains challenging because of a lack of implementation of the indexing spec
… we tried to unify the locating methodology that attempts to adequately address some of these use cases
… we decided not to drill down into cfi-level locating because it gets complicated quickly, and we wanted to find a way to achieve these use cases in a universal and replicable manner
… we're finding one way to address them, but it does not mean that there aren't other future ways to address them... feel free to steal any or all of them

wolfgang: yes, we can start there and add to them

Michelle_: nothing to add particularly about education, but it would be good to define what we want to aim for with use cases, so that we don't need to rework and rewrite... if the spec is the end game, let's keep that in mind so we don't have to redo the work

<zheng_xu> mateus: maybe we can start with write, collect and go through the use cases

wolfgang: and we can get more information that is not a technical solution, but more of a problem... and we need to get clear insights into what the locating mechanism involves... far from a concrete implementation

<zheng_xu> zheng_xu: the problem I had was when trying to implement selector I found some missing part

<zheng_xu> wolfgang: thanks for attending the session and see you

<zheng_xu> zakmin end meeting

<zheng_xu> zakmin, end meeting