DPUB IG Telco, 2016-02-22: Report on EPUB3.1 and on CSS F2F meeting; ARIA call for comments

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

EPUB3.1

Tzviya Siegman gave an overview of the ongoing EPUB3.1 work. IDPF has issued a first draft for EPUB3.1, which is currently under review by the community. The timeline is very aggressive. The goal is a better alignment with OWP, with Accessibility, general consolidation and simplification. Some highlights of the proposed changes:

• Specification reorganization with an umbrella document
• Move the the nav files for publications, removed ncx files
• You can use either HTML or XHTML serializations (before it was on XHTML)
• Replacing epub:type with the entries in the DPUB-ARIA module (not fully replaced yet)
• Work on “browser friendly format”, related to PWP
• Limited metadata set (although there is pushback on this)
• Require WCAG2.0 conformance, will provide an a11y module
• Remove epub:switch

A F2F meeting is planned in April, in Bordeaux where there will be a decision on deferring some features, and producing a major new draft.

The EPUB 3.1 needs feedback!

(There is also a public slide set presenting the changes.)

CSS and Houding TF Meetings

Alan Stearns gave a report on the CSS Houdini TF and the CSS WG Face-to-face meetings.

The Houdini Task Force worked on four first public drafts:

1. Custom properties and values (a “level 2” of the current document already in the mainstream of the CSS WG)
2. Typed Object Model, a better version of the CSS Object Model
3. “Worklets”, i.e., running constrained scripts
4. Custom paint, using worklets, to add your own painting code

These are all already experimented with in Chrome, hopefully interoperability in future.

As for the CSS WG, the interesting issues from the meeting for the DPUB IG:

1. Microsoft is working on a new draft specifying properly the table behavior, with emphasis on interoperability
2. Handling of extended color displays
3. Character alignments in table, big progress on edge cases
4. Lots of work on test suites for writing modes

The group also talked about font metrics in Houdini, just defining the problem a bit better.

Subsequent discussion addressed the pagination issue; the current strategy of, eventually, writing a pagination script on top of Houdini, with custom layout, is still in people's mind.

This group could continue to provide issues, e.g., on problems raised by STEM publications. (Note that the issue on character alignments in tables was very much triggered by the feedbacks of this group.)

A final problem area is personalization, which is of interest for many, but nobody really knows how to do it. The idea of setting up a common Task Force on the top between the CSS WG and the DPUB IG will be explored

ARIA Extended Image Descriptions

The ARIA Working Group issued a request for comments on the @aria-details and the @aria-linktype attributes, both are relevant for the DPUB ARIA module.

The former resembles the @aria-describedby attribute, already in the specification, but makes the usage of the attribute much more specific, to be used indicating the details of a specific element (like an image). Although not restricted to, it is strongly related to the (upcoming) <details> element in HTML5.

The latter is used to describe the nature of a link; it is a lot like a @rel attribute, but with a specific, controlled vocabulary which is still to be defined (there will be a core set of terms, and the DPUB-ARIA module will add some more).

Comments on these attributes are welcome!