DPUB IG Telco, 2016-04-25: A11y note, Notes in HTML

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

Accessibility Note

Charles LaPierre reported about the latest editorial round on the upcoming accessibility note. There were only administrative and editorial issues to be discussed; the group has agreed to publish the note, as an official W3C IG Note, on the 3rd of May.

Notes in HTML

Shane McCarron and David MacDonald presented a draft they are busy with on adding a note element e.g., footnote, endnote, etc. to HTML in some way or other. This is very early work, though also based on an earlier discussion thread on the Interest Group. The intention on the group meeting was, primarily, to see if there is an interest, from the publishers' point of view, on having such a set of elements (specifically: note, noteref, and notegroup). There were lots of question and discussion on the group call, but it is clear that such HTML elements would be of a great interest for the publishing community, in view of the widespread usage of footnotes, endnotes, references, etc, that is used in publishing.

Beyond clarification questions the discussion on the call covered issues like whether the way forward is to use the route of bona fide HTML extensions or HTML Custom elements; whether there is anything to discuss with the CSS Working Group on this, the relations to the annotation work, and the general way forward and how this IG can help it.