EPUB 3 Working Group Telco — Minutes

Date: 2021-10-14

See also the Agenda and the IRC Log

Attendees

Present: Toshiaki Koike, Wendy Reid, Masakazu Kitahara, Shinya Takami (高見真也), Matthew Chan, Matt Garrish, Brady Duga, Murata Makoto

Regrets:

Guests:

Chair: Dave Cramer

Scribe(s): Matthew Chan

Content:

Dave Cramer: there is a new member of the working group. You can introduce yourself now if you wish.

John Roque: hello. Vicky is our new Apple group rep.

Victoria Lee: I work on exporting to epub from pages. Fun thing about myself is that I like to play violin.

1. Publication of Structural Semantics Vocabulary as Working Group Note

See github pull request #1847.

See github issue #1763.

Dave Cramer: last week we resolved on separating SSV into a wg note
… we just need a formal resolution to publish it, and to use echidna

Proposed resolution: Publish the SSV as a working group note, using ECHIDNA, using the short name “epub-ssv” (Wendy Reid)

Murata Makoto: the link in Ivan’s message doesn’t work, so I can’t see the note

Dave Cramer: https://github.com/w3c/epub-specs/blob/main/epub33/ssv/index.html

Wendy Reid: See The editor’s draft for the note

Dave Cramer: +1

Wendy Reid: +1

Matthew Chan: +1

Matt Garrish: +1

Toshiaki Koike: +1

Masakazu Kitahara: +1

Shinya Takami (高見真也): +1

Murata Makoto: does this document have to do with the IMS Global Consortium? Do they need to see this?

Matt Garrish: no, i think this originally came from DAISY

Murata Makoto: what about the content under sec. 10?

Matt Garrish: this is all stuff that came from us, we don’t have dependence on any other party

Resolution #1: Publish the SSV as a working group note, using ECHIDNA, using the short name “epub-ssv”

Dave Cramer:

2. iframes and external content (issue epub-specs#1061)

See github issue epub-specs#1061.

Dave Cramer: this is the issue of using iframes to bring in external content (e.g. youtube videos) into epub

Brady Duga: +1

Dave Cramer: there’s been fair amount of discussion on github since the last meeting
… there seems to be general sense that this is quite a complex issue esp. re. security and privacy
… maybe not something we want to tackle late in epub 3.3

Brady Duga: we need to focus on the issue, which is whether it is legal to do this in the spec. Answer seems to be no.
… external resources must be video, audio, font, or something loaded by a script
… longer answer of whether we should allow it, is it testable… those are all questions for another version of the epub spec
… including videos in the epub zip does run up against size constraints, and maybe iframes are the solution, but we don’t need to decide that now
… Ivan raised a potential testing issue over in github, and we could maybe take that up
… but we can resolve now that it is not legal to embed a youtube video via iframe

Murata Makoto: +1

Dave Cramer: last month we had our first meeting with PING about epub
… one of the things they are most wary of is remote resources
… so i’d rather not open another vector this late in a revision

Matt Garrish: ditto, this hits on issues across the board related to horizontal review. Even a11y.
… this whole blurring of epub and the web is a little frightening at this stage
… this needs to be more well thought out
… I’d rather try to clamp down our foreign resource allowance to specific elements (e.g. <video>, <audio>)
… this could help us with our security review too

Dave Cramer: you were saying you could only use remote video via the <video> element itself

Matt Garrish: right, and I’m sure most people use remote resources this way anyway

Brady Duga: does <object> still exist? If so, you could put a video in <object>, and then testability becomes an issue again

Matt Garrish: does <object> work for video though? Would you still get the player controls?

Brady Duga: I haven’t seen it used that way, just a weird edge case

Dave Cramer: <object> is still in the spec

Brady Duga: I don’t have a problem with limiting external videos to the <video> tag, makes things simpler (especially since we don’t define codecs for videos)

Shinya Takami (高見真也): i wouldn’t recommend opening the spec to enhancements in external resources now

Dave Cramer: seems like we’re talking about a feature request, in which case we could defer this to a future revision
… let’s open a new issue about the idea of tying remote resources to the context of particular elements

Murata Makoto: +1

Proposed resolution: Defer issue 1061 as a feature request, open new issue addressing remote resources and elements like <video> (Wendy Reid)

Matt Garrish: +1

Wendy Reid: +1

Shinya Takami (高見真也): +1

Brady Duga: it’s a little weird to turn this into a feature request, because the original issue was just asking for clarification on whether or not it was legal to do the youtube embedding thing

Brady Duga: +1

Dave Cramer: the comments kind of made it into a feature request

Dave Cramer: +1

Toshiaki Koike: +1

Masakazu Kitahara: +1

Matthew Chan: +1

Murata Makoto: +1

jroque: +1

Resolution #2: Defer issue 1061 as a feature request, open new issue addressing remote resources and elements like <video>

3. Update on status of horizontal reviews

Dave Cramer: just checking status, given that we hope to go to CR in the not too distant future
… basically we need horizontal review from 4 different groups
… PING (privacy) - we’ve started this, issue in their github asking for review, initial meeting with them, joint meeting with them during TPAC, and we don’t yet have any formal issue from them about our spec (but they do have concerns about remote resources, larger issue of user expectations about privacy for ebooks)
… users may have different expectations than for the web in general, and techniques used in web browsers to help user understand the source of content, who might be watching, and most of those browser affordances are missing from epub
… TAG (technical architecture group) - we’ve not yet requested formal review from them
… usually the TAG wants an explainer for the spec, but our spec is 20 years old. Hopefully the overview in the spec will suffice for this purpose
… epub is a heavy user of web tech but does not exist on the web, per se, so we’ll see
… i18n (internationalization) - we have issues from them, but most have been resolved.

Wendy Reid: not sure if they’ve approved us, but I don’t think we have any more issues here
… i’m least worried about this horizontal review

Dave Cramer: this has been a focus of epub 3 all along, so yes
… APA (a11y) - I didn’t see anything on github from their formal review. But we’ve also had quite a few rounds of comments, and there is a meeting scheduled with them during TPAC?

Wendy Reid: yes, its scheduled for the 28th 10AM Boston (14 UTC)

Matt Garrish: yes, that’s basically the status. Avneesh has been coordinating re. the a11y part of spec

Dave Cramer: epub has been highly focused on a11y from its own perspective since the beginning

Matt Garrish: we work with them on a bunch of stuff, so i’m not concerned

Murata Makoto: on behalf of JP DAISY consortium I wrote a report about ruby issues, but as far as the spec is concerned nothing will change

Dave Cramer: I think there’s still work on ruby going on in general

Wendy Reid: we’ll also have a joint meeting with PING on Oct 26th 15 UTC (11AM Boston, 8AM west coast)
… invites should be coming around shortly

4. AOB?

Dave Cramer: I would remind everyone that our 2 most important things right now are the horizontal reviews and the testing
… I’ve been adding to the tests
… and please help if you can, it’s really important
… we’re trying to test every assertion in the spec and make the spec better that way

Wendy Reid: one meeting we are having during TPAC week (Oct 25th) is that we’re holding a session called epub next
… we’re trying to get as many publishing stakeholders together as we can

Wendy Reid: See Meeting reference for EPUB Next

Wendy Reid: will the next thing be epub 4, or something else?
… WG members will see the invite, please come
… but also, if you know anyone not a member of the W3C but who is interested in this space, please pass along the word
… this is 27th 9AM Boston (13 UTC)

Dave Cramer: okay, that’s it. Thanks everyone for coming. We’ll talk next week!

Dave Cramer: RRSAgent: bye

5. Resolutions