Publishing Working Group Telco — Minutes

Date: 2019-04-08

See also the Agenda and the IRC Log

Attendees

Present: Ivan Herman, George Kerscher, Wendy Reid, Ben Schroeter, Ric Wright, Gregorio Pellegrino, Joshua Pyle, Bill Kasdorf, Simon Collinson, Franco Alvarado, Garth Conboy, Avneesh Singh, Benjamin Young, Brady Duga, Laurent Le Meur, Marisa DeMeglio

Regrets: Tzviya Siegman, Rachel Comerford, Geoff Jukes, Mateus Teixeira, Luc Audrain, Jun-ichi Yoshii, Romain Deltour, Dave Cramer, Nick Ruffilo, Teenya Franklin, Matt Garrish, Vladimir Levantovsky

Guests: Lloyd Rasmussen

Chair: Wendy Reid

Scribe(s): Ben Schroeter

Content:


Bill Kasdorf: Wendy is Tzviya today

Wendy Reid: https://www.w3.org/publishing/groups/publ-wg/Meetings/Minutes/2019/2019-04-01-pwg

Ben Schroeter: Minutes from last week approved

Resolution #1: last week’s minutes approved

1. Publishing CG announcement

Wendy Reid: Announcement: publishing community group has 2 chairs, meetings to start soon
… free to join if interested

2. Should there be a TOC if supplemental materials are provided in an audio book?

Wendy Reid: https://github.com/w3c/wpub/issues/408

Wendy Reid: issue 408: should there be a TOC? spec says there must be if supplemental content is present in the resources. Any opposition?

Avneesh Singh: +1

Garth Conboy: TOC is an ordered list; for many of these supplemental contents there is no specific order

Wendy Reid: if we don’t put it in the TOC it is not referenceable for a user agent

Garth Conboy: putting in TOC implies an order that it may not have

Avneesh Singh: it has some order; not entirely random
… alt text html file follows dame principle, must be in TOC

Marisa DeMeglio: reminds me of landmarks in EPUB - not necessarily inherent order
… don’t agree that supp content needs same treatment as alt content

Wendy Reid: supp content can be a list of charts or pics of an author

Avneesh Singh: concept is similar

Ivan Herman: why is supp material so special that having it listed in the resources is not enough?

Joshua Pyle: +1 to Ivan

Bill Kasdorf: +1 to resources

Wendy Reid: how should resources be represented in reading order?

George Kerscher: resources always referenced by something; having them in TOC is provides standard mechanism to get at them

Ivan Herman: resources is a list of references to files, each of which can have one to many rel values
… from that point on it’s up to the user agent to find

George Kerscher: is the rel value in the manifest?

Ivan Herman: yes, and there may be several values as well

Wendy Reid: See also https://github.com/w3c/wpub/issues/405

Brady Duga: want to avoid getting bad audiobook TOCs, prefer it be an optional requirement because reading system may be able to impose its own more accurate TOC
… TOC should not be required just to have a list of supp materials

George Kerscher: Brady has a very good point.

George Kerscher: TOC should be meaningful and something a RS can trust.

Laurent Le Meur: agreed, for textbooks we have a special rel called cover, that allows us to put it in a TOC or not. if there is a small set of supp content that we always find in audiobooks, let’s use rel values like we use cover

Wendy Reid: instead of a required TOC of supp content, we require rel value that is applicable to that type of content

George Kerscher: having a TOC that, when present, is good and utilizable, sounds like putting a requirement on the reading system to use it if present

Wendy Reid: if the publisher has gone to the effort, it is likely that the reading system should pay attention to it. But can’t define “good” TOC

Marisa DeMeglio: it might be confusing if treatment is different across reading systems

Laurent Le Meur: we are living with that with covers currently - reading systems deal with differently
… if the rel value is not in the TOC, then the reading system won’t see it? Best practice instead of requirement

Benjamin Young: not necessarily an ordered list; publishers can’t define order if we just have resources floating - needs to be expressible by publishers

Laurent Le Meur: need to define what is wanted - are there other things besides booklets?

Benjamin Young: if this is a foundational data model that we are going to share, we may have publications with a whole host of supp content

Avneesh Singh: if there is an order that publisher want to define for supp content TOC is compulsory

Ivan Herman: if there is supp content that has an order, there is no need to make TOC is compulsory, because that is what will be used. The toc doesn’t really make sense for content that is not in order. Unnecessary to require TOC “if x and y are true”, for example.

George Kerscher: consistency between base spec an audiobook spec would be great, as much as possible.

Brady Duga: the more I hear about potential use cases, the less I think we should use TOC for supp materials, and tackle when we discuss synchronized media
… textbook and audio appear at the same time, for example

Marisa DeMeglio: we have an issue currently regarding alternative media, like adding synchronized media to an audiobook (audiobook with text use case)

Wendy Reid: we should create a mechanism to enable this, but also for when this doesn’t happen

Marisa DeMeglio: maybe we should have the information in more than one place, even though that can be a bummer for reading systems

Wendy Reid: will revisit this topic soon

3. duration in the context of WPUB

Wendy Reid: https://github.com/w3c/wpub/issues/307

Wendy Reid: https://github.com/w3c/wpub/issues/420

Wendy Reid: duration for entire content vs. duration at the resource level

Ivan Herman: duration currently defined in audiobook draft - nothing in there for duration is audiobook specific
… ability to add duration to a resource is generic - doesn’t have to be audio could be video or whatever else
… does it make sense to have a duration for the book as a whole? for audio books, it is a requirement, but not for a general web publication. but this may not be restricted to audio books. Maybe there could be a video book. The concept is generic, but it may be a requirement for audiobooks and not for general web publications.

Avneesh Singh: generic, but in audio profile should be compulsory. But what is duration of whole book? Does that include branches that are not included in the reading order?

Wendy Reid: Never seen a case where resources are not part of the reading order, but it could be possible. So we should include them in the entire duration.

Brady Duga: what is definition of accurate as far as duration? Want to make sure there is no requirement for the reading system.

Ivan Herman: what happens today?

Brady Duga: we determine the duration

Benjamin Young: agree with duga

Avneesh Singh: Duration is important metadata

Marisa DeMeglio: wwe will need this for sync media too; might not be a precise. We have concept of skippability e.g. user turns off page number announcements.
Lloyd Rasmussen: We are not creating books with skippable items yet. But when we will create them we will leave out skippable items from total duration. Agree that the reading system should manage those values.

Ivan Herman: book level duration is more like general advisory information, not necessarily used by user agent for processing.
… if this is the case, then requiring it to be present sounds like a step too far. Should have/nice to have
… we have the duration set for an audio or video file. Is it required to provide that info as part of the resource description, or will reading system also ignore that?

Benjamin Young: https://schema.org/duration

Benjamin Young: we use schema.org duration property
… what is the point on insisting or not insisting… is it a requirement for reading systems? What is the use case we are trying to solve for?

Wendy Reid: top level duration is useful for user experience, e.g. product detail page. most commonly used on reading system side to break down chapters for example.

Brady Duga: we won’t use resource level durations but will pre-process all the audio to determine. But a web only reading system may not have this capability.

Wendy Reid: maybe the metadata is not used, but it can be provided in case the reading system can make use of it

Avneesh Singh: +1 to move to WP

Wendy Reid: should we move this to WP since it is not necessarily specific to audiobooks?

Proposed resolution: Move the duration property to web publications (Wendy Reid)

Benjamin Young: issue 420 - are we moving the requirement?

Ivan Herman: the term definition should be generic for WP, then we’ll discuss 420

Ivan Herman: +1

Garth Conboy: +1

Tim Cole: +1

Bill Kasdorf: +1

Laurent Le Meur: +1

George Kerscher: +1q+

Franco Alvarado: +1

Ben Schroeter: any opposition to the proposal to move to WP?

Ben Schroeter: vote

Ben Schroeter: +1

Brady Duga: +1

Avneesh Singh: +1

Resolution #2: Move the duration property to web publications

George Kerscher: ivan mentioned attribute about total duration - when a publication is time based media, then the total time would be very useful and I would examine it before downloading an audiobook

Joshua Pyle: +1

George Kerscher: like number of pages of a book

Benjamin Young: duration only allowed on audio books and media, but at the top level for creative works we could use https://schema.org/timeRequired
… “estimated time to consume”

Ivan Herman: sounds like a great match

Benjamin Young: schema.org/timeRequired = “Approximate or typical time it takes to work with or through this learning resource for the typical intended target audience, e.g. ‘P30M’, ‘P1H25M’.”

Wendy Reid: interesting alternative. must think on it.

Ivan Herman: maybe we could in the WP document we make an explicit reference to time required at the top level and see if we can live with that, and keep the precise resource durations separate

Bill Kasdorf: +1 to distinguishing between timeRequired and duration

Wendy Reid: I will add to 420

George Kerscher: “Approximate reading time”

4. F2F

Wendy Reid: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-TB-_KCg97smmjcsbIVpi728qduOwESr3Og91-2Gtd4/edit?usp=sharing

Wendy Reid: face to face coming up
… put your name on the list if attending, also dinner list and agenda items. last chance.

Wendy Reid: and dietary requirements too please

Ben Schroeter: Meeting adjourned


5. Resolutions