EPUB 3 Working Group Telco — Minutes

Date: 2021-04-01

See also the Agenda and the IRC Log

Attendees

Present: Garth Conboy, Masakazu Kitahara, Toshiaki Koike, Matthew Chan, Ben Schroeter, Shinya Takami (高見真也), Dan Lazin, Wendy Reid, Matt Garrish, Brady Duga

Regrets:

Guests: Dave Cramer

Chair: Dave Cramer

Scribe(s): Matthew Chan

Content:

1. TF Dates

Wendy Reid: i sent an email out earlier this afternoon/evening
… we have dates now for the first two meetings of the virtual locators TF and the FXL a11y TF
… FXL a11y meeting 9am tuesday, virtual locators on wed 7th 11am
… still seeking people to lead these TFs
… no date yet for scripting meeting
… still waiting on a few people to submit their availability

Dan Lazin: for the TFs, i was talking to book indexer friend, and she mentioned there was some discussion between pro indexes and adobe around getting page number like things from INDD into epubs
… she asked if we could involve some indexers

Wendy Reid: really good Q. If you would like to put them in touch with us? We can invite them to the TF

Dave Cramer: we want them, yes
… delighted to have them as guests at the meeting

Dan Lazin: great, i’ll help make that happen

2. Clarify base IRI

See github pull request #1468.

Dave Cramer: this is a PR about base IRI in package documents

See github issue #1374, #1456.

Matt Garrish: basically all the PR does is define base IRI for package because it wasn’t clear how that was to be calculated
… it is defined for container.xml, but for package doc there was just a stray sentence that absolute IRIs are to be calculated from base IRI of document
… Ivan wanted some clarification
… PR pulls out that statement and elaborates on it
… Laurent suggested that maybe we define everything in core docs as paths rather than IRIs
… not sure why we’d want to do that since we already define abstract container to allow us to use IRI language
… how far do we want to get into relative paths vs absolute paths
… can we just clean up what we already have, or do we want to take up this IRI vs path question at this point?

Dave Cramer: i’m happy with PR
… worried about Laurent’s idea because not sure we want to start talking about paths when all the other specs that we rely upon are already happy about how we define things
… also, this issue didn’t come out of a concrete problem with a RS or similar, it came from abstract issue about spec language

Matt Garrish: the PR seemed to make Ivan happy
… from the perspective of what we need to describe here, I think we’ve done enough
… the question about changing to path language leads off into other areas

Dave Cramer: i think we should accept the PR, and then if Laurent wants to raise the other question, maybe he can come back with a more detailed rationale

Matt Garrish: there was an issue about whether relative IRIs MUST be resolved, but it was only ever the intention that it be possible if you need to do it

Proposed resolution: Merge PR 1468 (Wendy Reid)

Dan Lazin: +1

Ben Schroeter: +1

Matt Garrish: +1

Toshiaki Koike: +1

Wendy Reid: +1

Matthew Chan: +1

Masakazu Kitahara: +1

Brady Duga: +1

Shinya Takami (高見真也): +1

Resolution #1: Merge PR 1468

3. Pagelist Requirements

See github pull request #1588.

See github issue #1471.

Dave Cramer: we had required that the order of the nav elements had to match the order of the elements in the spine
… then when this was implemented in epubcheck, it turned out that it made a bunch of epubs invalid
… we eventually got that sorted out, but we never went back to address the corresponding issue in the pagelist
… mgarrish is this going to be covered in epub a11y instead of core now

Matt Garrish: yes. The issue is that this forces the pagelist to match the order of the digital version, which is not at all helpful when there is an expectation that the pagelist correspond to print

Brady Duga: why are we removing this requirement?
… the toc is not without controversy because it breaks UIs
… we didn’t want to make publishers go back and fix their content
… is this similar?

Matt Garrish: here we’re just removing the strict requirement that the pagelist match
… so we wouldn’t be invalidating anything
… not the same as the toc because the toc is being used by RSes in various ways
… but we don’t know that RSes are using pagelist in the same way
… allowing authors to reorder pagelist might actually make it align with expectations

Brady Duga: so, does this mean, for e.g., that page 7 could come after page 10?

Matt Garrish: yes, but you could still do that right now if that was the order of content in the spine

Wendy Reid: with the current requirements we might accidentally be forcing the page 7 after page 10 thing
… with the PR that might still happen, but it would be by choice, as opposed to being forced by spec

Ben Schroeter: you could also have a case where the print book has a sidebar that in the digital version comes after the body text
… in cases like that you might want the pagelist to come out of order intentionally

Matt Garrish: i’m not sure if that would be an example of where we’d want that for a11y purposes or not, but there are situations where you’d want the pagelist to match print content rather than spine order

Dave Cramer: i’m seeing several cases where we’re making the choice that these “best practices” are better off being in the a11y spec when the directly impact a11y rather than try to bake good practice into the epub spec itself, especially when there is such a diversity of content

Ben Schroeter: but i’ve always wonder why pagelist is an a11y feature
… it is, but it is also useful for everyone

Matt Garrish: that’s a possibility we could take up, i.e. just recommend something about page sequencing

Proposed resolution: Merge PR 1588 (Wendy Reid)

Ben Schroeter: +1

Matthew Chan: +1

Matt Garrish: +1

Shinya Takami (高見真也): +1

Wendy Reid: +1

Dan Lazin: +1

Toshiaki Koike: 0

Brady Duga: +0 as I don’t fully understand all the implications

Masakazu Kitahara: 0

Resolution #2: Merge PR 1588

Wendy Reid: i understand your concern duga
… and this is something we can take a look at when we do virtual locators as well
… as there is crossover

Brady Duga: it may be fine, but i’d just like to think about it some more first

4. Republish Drafts

Dave Cramer: there have been some significant changes to our WDs
… we’d need a resolution to republish
… i prefer to publish early and often
… this reduces confusion in general
… did we want to do a11y too, or maybe just core and RS?

Wendy Reid: have there been enough changes to a11y that its worth it to republish?

Matt Garrish: yes, there have been changes, and there is no reason not to

Proposed resolution: Publish new drafts of the core, reading systems, and accessibility documents (Wendy Reid)

Dan Lazin: +1

Brady Duga: +1

Matt Garrish: +1

Wendy Reid: +1

Ben Schroeter: +1

Matthew Chan: +1

Toshiaki Koike: +1

Resolution #3: Publish new drafts of the core, reading systems, and accessibility documents

5. Virtual F2F

Wendy Reid: i think we were putting this off in hopes of in person meeting instead of virtual
… there is usually one a TPAC and one in spring
… we were thinking of just having two longer meetings, back to back (like we did for the TPAC one)
… we were considering the 13th/14th or the 27th/28th of May

Dave Cramer: these meetings allow us to have some longer discussions, which might not fit into the ordinary 1hr a week
… this is just informational at this point. We’ll try to send out an email later to see what works for everyone

Wendy Reid: we’re working around May holidays

Dave Cramer: one other thing is that we haven’t yet come up with a standard for how to review tests
… do we assign a certain number of reviewers for PRs related to tests?
… who are those people?
… maybe we can have this on the agenda at the next meeting
… we can also talk about the scope of testing, how granular the tests should be?

Dan Lazin: i have one PR out right now that merges in all of dauwhe’s existing tests
… and then I have another one out to add some new tests

Wendy Reid: have a great weekend everyone, we’ll see you next week!

Dave Cramer: RRSAgent: make logs public

Dave Cramer: RRSAgent: bye

6. Resolutions