DPUB IG Telco, 2015-06-22: ARIA, STEM survey, CSS, Web Publications

See minutes online for a more detailed record of the discussions. (The headers below link into the relevant sections of the minutes.)

ARIA described-at attribute

There are some discussions around the aria-describedat attribute defined for ARIA 1.1, and the group was asked to formulate an opinion whether this attribute would be used by the publishing community. The discussion led to the conclusion that

• the attribute is important for the publishing community and would be good for digital publishing
• the publishing industry moves slowly, so it cannot be expected to be implemented right away; i.e., its acceptance for ARIA 1.1 should not depend on that
• the fact (and objection) that aria-describedat may lead to an "outside" document (e.g., can require an external link when reading an offline document) should not be considered as major because of the general trend trying to make the differences between offline and online fade away

It has been agreed that Deborah Kaplan will create a more formal answer to the Protocols and Formats Working Group (the guardians of ARIA).

STEM Survey

Peter Krautzberger gave a status overview of the STEM survey evaluation. The data, extracted from the survey, has been put into an SQL database, and the task force is busy formulating "questions" by cross referencing the various tables. The results will be compiled into a W3C Note. The deficiencies of the survey were also discussed; many questions were around workflow rather than tech issues, and there were probably too many of them.

One possible goal would be to see if there are formats (akin to MathML) that could/should be standardized at or around W3C and that the STEM Publishing community would need. 3D, chemical markup formats came up, but, on a different level, standardization of the iPython (now Jupyter) format may also come to the fore (although this is still very early and not sure whether it is appropriate for W3C).

DPUB-ARIA

Tzviya Siegman reported on the advances for the DPUB-ARIA document; the latest draft is now ready to go for a formal First Public Working Draft. The major change is to adopt the dpub-* style for all the attribute to avoid clashes with other vocabularies (e.g., dpub-abstract) and an explicit callout to the role of IDPF in the creation and commenting of the spec.

CSS Priority

Shinyu Murakami has add some CJK specific items to the CSS priority list. During the discussion the issue of an explicit mention of Bopomofo came up, and it was agreed that this would be added.

On a more general level the need of adding comments and priorities to each CSS entry came up, and Dave Cramer agreed to start working on this.

Web Publication (packaging, etc)

Markus Gylling and Ivan Herman reported on some discussion they had, as a followup on packaging and related subject. The important point that came up is that we may need an abstract concept of a "Web Publication", which refers to a group of resources that together can be considered to be a publication. Such a Web Publication should have a unique ID, and it is regardless of wether the publication is offline or online. When online, an HTTP GET may return a Web manifest (which then would list the constituents that clients may cache and store), when offline, it may refer to a real physical package that can be downloaded and unpacked (and may also contain a manifest). The core issue is that the primary identifier should be transparent to online/offline status. The online version may be the "canonical" one, when it "goes" offline it needs to carry with it that original Identifier to handle incoming references.

What should be done is to work out some scenarios using HTTP protocol work and some elements of a client's functionalities.