EPUB 3 Working Group Virtual Locators Task Force Telco — Minutes

Date: 2021-09-17

Attendees

Present: Pilar Wyman, Tzviya Siegman, Wendy Reid, Ivan Herman, George Kerscher, Laurent Le Meur, Dan Lazin

Regrets: Brady Duga, Ben Schroeter

Guests:

Chair: Wendy Reid

Scribe(s): Dan Lazin

Content:

1. Continue work on the Note

Dan Lazin: Why didn’t this taskforce come around sooner?
… Why has this problem not been solved in 20 years?

Tzviya Siegman: We’ve been trying to solve this problem for years, and the indexing specification tried to solve it.
… This came to be from figuring out which parts of the satellite specifications could be brought into the master spec.
… Indexes has a lot of useful information but there’s nothing normative in the spec.

Wendy Reid: We did a survey and asked people what their interests were and page-numbering came up a lot.
… Also we have two open issues about page numbers.

Ivan Herman: The whole issue about annotating webpages or pages in a book has been around for 10 or 15 years and browsers never took it seriously.
… There is a web annotations recommendation that could solve this problem but it is not implemented in browsers.
… What the task force is doing is saying “the ideal thing is not implemented. What is the suboptimal thing that we can do?”

Tzviya Siegman:

Ivan Herman: Browsers still require that there be IDs in the document for anchors.

George Kerscher: The problem gets worse with screen readers, because they read from a virtual buffer, not the real HTML.

Dan Lazin: There was also an issue about textbook pages that created this task force … but I guess it just pushed us over the edge.

Dan Lazin: Here’s what Chrome is doing now: https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/link-to-highlighted-text-webpage-chrome/

Wendy Reid: I spoke to my team of UX designers and one of the problems we’ve been running into is “what do automatic page numbers look like?”
… I took screenshots from various applications to see how they handle page numbers … and everyone does it differently. So we have a long way to go.
… My team got really into it, but I’m still working on it. Might have a presentation for you next time.

1. Continue work on the Note

Wendy Reid: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11GypOjE9xOTaINATl5bxVIA3Mc9jzNBGCr6GT_KNaQ4/edit#heading=h.gbsmtjlkuon

Wendy Reid: So let’s continue to write the note.

Dan Lazin: Arbitrarily, let’s fill out the Format and Persistence section.

Wendy Reid: [editing the document]

Dan Lazin: (See changes in Google Doc to understand discussion.)

Wendy Reid: [notes from Readium discussions on this topic]

Wendy Reid: https://github.com/readium/architecture/issues/123

Wendy Reid: https://github.com/readium/r2-streamer-swift/pull/209#issuecomment-859346247