DPUB IG Telco, 2016-06-20: CSS WG, Use Cases Document

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

Bridging with the CSS WG

This was a continuation of the discussion from last week on how to bridge with the CSS WG better. What was agreed is that there should be more active contacts with (a) reading system developers who hit the major issues themselves and are major part of the ecosystem and (b) with technical people in e-publication production who may hit issues that they have to circumvent with special code (possibly polyfills). It would also be important to find out how the features defined in XSL-FO are currently used in publishing and what difficulties are hit when those are mapped onto CSS. Two actions are planned

1. organize a meeting with the major Reading System developers, like Google Play, iBooks, Readium, AER.IO, Bluefire, etc, to collect their input
2. set up a (wiki) page to collect the XSL-FO experiences (eg, from Antenna House, Prince, etc) that should be mapped on CSS and what difficulties they hit

It was emphasized that real business cases are needed; an experimental implementation in a not-widely-used platform will not be convincing enough for browser manufacturers...

Use Cases' Document Structure and Editing

The discussion (also in preparation to the upcoming Virtual F2F) was mainly on how to structure the current use case document. The example of the use cases of the archival task force was mentioned, although it was felt that the structure in that document is a little bit too complex (and also related to some sort of a workflow), so it should be somewhere in between. Also, some real "story" should be added around the individual use cases, which are often just a one sentence. It was therefore agreed that, for example in section 2.7 of the document we should all add a story around 1-2 case, and then organize the document accordingly.

What are also missing for a proper organization are

• succinct definitions of the requirements that are referred to from the use cases
• prioritization of the requirements

It was also noted that some requirements are mutually contradictory; these should be at least called out and, possibly, discussed and decided upon. (Part of this may be the subject of the Virtual F2F.)