Publishing Working Group Telco — Minutes

Date: 2019-10-14

See also the Agenda and the IRC Log

Attendees

Present: Ivan Herman, Nick Ruffilo, Kenneth Dougherty, Teenya Franklin, Romain Deltour, Garth Conboy, Dave Cramer, Deborah Kaplan, Ben Schroeter, Charles LaPierre, Benjamin Young, Avneesh Singh, Brady Duga, Ric Wright, Marisa DeMeglio, George Kerscher

Regrets: Wendy Reid, Geoff Jukes, Mateus Teixeira, Luc Audrain, Gregorio Pellegrino, Juan Corona, Joshua Pyle, Matt Garrish, Laurent Le Meur

Guests:

Chair: Garth Conboy

Scribe(s): Nick Ruffilo

Content:

Garth Conboy: Approval of minutes… :: silence :: approved

Garth Conboy: https://www.w3.org/publishing/groups/publ-wg/Meetings/Minutes/2019/2019-10-07-pwg

Resolution #1: last week’s minutes approved

1. Audiobook PR, user agent behavior (PR #28)

Garth Conboy: See Latest audiobook PR

Garth Conboy: Wendy did what she said, and there is a pull request in for user agent behavior for audiobooks. There’s a stream in the comments of the PR. Ivan approved it. Is there discussion?

Ivan Herman: from my point of view, it’s ok. My comments were secondary, but the main part of the text defines minimum behavior from an audiobook reading system and I’m not the one who should say yeah or nay.
… It really needs a review from someone like Matt, or someone in the audio world.

Dave Cramer: I am just starting to look at this and have also been building little scripts that implement some of this. In general, I find it much harder to comment on pull requests than just the editors draft. We can merge it and then comment
… I don’t think in the context, merging something is not a final endorsement

Ivan Herman: for the record, I’m fine with this as well

Garth Conboy: I don’t care if we merge it or not, but I wanted to have the opportunity to review it. I’d like to have a chance to look at it.
… I’m personally in Dave’s camp that it’s easier to read as a pretty HTML document than a DIFF, so if folks are OK - we will merge and then comment/review from there in the editor’s draft.

Brady Duga: You don’t have to DIFF - you can click to view the whole file including the changes - so you can review whatever you wish.

Garth Conboy: as Ben points out, 2.4 is new. I’m happy to merge or leave people to review.

Ivan Herman: I am a little uncomfortable to merge myself - Wendy should do it when and if she feels comfortable with this. We should say it’s OK, but leave her to do that.

Garth Conboy: Absolutely. Wendy is not on the call, so she should get a bunch of additional action items ^_^ (laughs)

2. Lack of conformsTo too draconian?

Garth Conboy: https://github.com/w3c/pub-manifest/issues/101

Garth Conboy: There has been quite a bit of commentary on this. Matt and Ivan having a few, Ivan do you want to comment here?

Ivan Herman: I feel uncomfortable without Matt - the point is that conformsTo came into the standard not too long ago (September?) but what we realized is how it actually works is missing. The current official standard is draconian…
… it requires a list of references to specifications that the document conforms to. If it’s missing, everything stops and the user agent is supposed to return an error and finish. My original question is that ‘isn’t that harsh’ but then it’s how exactly does the usage work?

Ivan Herman: See proposal for a conformsTo mechanism

Ivan Herman: the clarification was around what we expect from conformsTo… What I did this morning was to write down what I see - I just put it on IRC - I put there a mechanism that is not yet reflected in any of the documents. It’s a reasonable behavior for a conformsTo. I haven’t gotten a reply or comment yet.
… I can summarize what I wrote there, or people can read it and comment there. Thats where we are.

Garth Conboy: You do have 1 thumbs up…

Ivan Herman: Which is more than 0…

Garth Conboy: What would you like to be the next step? … OK there is a PR version of this…

Ivan Herman: There is a PR of the preview status. We’re in a situation where there is an outstanding PR and the issue is on that one…
… so it’s not yet fully fleshed out in any text.

Dave Cramer: I am uneasy about the ‘draconian’ aspect of this. Thinking from the perspective of a web-dev who gets some audiobook who has the manifest. What i’m most interested in is going and getting the reading order. That’s the most important thing to present the user with what I want..
… so now I have to have an if statement that if the conformsTo isn’t there, the user can’t listen to the audiobook, even if everything else is there…

Ivan Herman: The discussion is around that - I was asking the same question. Formally and spec wise - what I came up with is a possibility is to have a kind of 0-level conformance reference. Which is saying the manifest conforms to what we describe in this text (publication manifest)
… and this is the minimal thing. The UA can say : “i can do something with this” but another UA might say it can do something more and needs a higher conformance.
… what I also consider is that this value - the basic conformance reference is a default value. If someone doesn’t put anything, then this is always there and the user agent can do something with that. Please go through the text and see if that makes sense.

Garth Conboy: Ivan, I’m looking at it now and I want to make sure I understand. In the top bullet, if it’s missing, it’s a fatal error, but we could possibly override with a default?

Ivan Herman: I have some notes, and the last point there would modify that step.

Garth Conboy: I’m personally with Dave that, having a non-fatal error and being able to pull out reading order seems good to me.

Benjaming Young: I am wondering if someone can make a case for the draconian approach. I agree with Dave that there is a real danger here of creating an infinite number of profiles that are incompatible by a generic reader…
… ultimately I don’t think anyone would actually conform to it - it should be a signal. If something gets stuck in there that is non-conformant, who cares - the consumer just wishes to read the book. If the reader can read it, that’s what’s important
… if there is a good reason to force this, let us know…

Garth Conboy: it sounds like that we like the default value so maybe we should lean that way on the call and ask Ivan & Draft to draft something that goes in that direction as a PR. It’s me or Matt
… There is the whole issue with Matt not being on the call, but I leave it to you to decide on that

3. update manifest processing to use infra types

Garth Conboy: See Issue #101

Garth Conboy: See Issue #98

Ivan Herman: See PR #103

Garth Conboy: There are 2 issues in this pull request - this is also one that Ivan and Matt have…
… Does anyone on the call want to run through this and hope to get to a consensus?

Ivan Herman: The work was done by Matt.
… I would prefer Romain to comment on this as he was the one initiating this whole work and can give a more appropriate background.

Romain Deltour: Basically it originated from trying to get rid of the webIGL as a way to describe a datastructure. In trying to harmonize the various manifests in the W3C, we wanted to use infra-types to represent the data structure. Matt’s editing the spec to replace webIGL for infra types.

Ivan Herman: See Infra standard

Romain Deltour: The WebIDL representative is moved to informative edits. A few different issues were raised when we looked at the algorithm. I think it’s clearer now, but we need more reviews there. It will be interesting to have more.

Garth Conboy: Looking at the PR, Romain you have one requested change outstanding and Ivan has approved it.

Ivan Herman: I am now repeating what Dave said earlier on the other PR. This was a pretty large change that made the document better and Matt did great work. Now it becomes difficult to discuss other issues and details with this as a PR.

Romain Deltour: I think my requests have been addressed in Matt’s latest changes

Ivan Herman: I would be in favor of merging this ASAP (as soon as Matt is comfortable) then we can comment and modify once it’s in. Again, this is something he should do…

Romain Deltour: +1 on merging and doing more reviews/changes based on Matt’s work

Garth Conboy: Sounds good for me. If there are subsequent changes, they will be smaller. Barring objection, why don’t we go ahead and put that as a request for Matt…

4. horizontal review results

Garth Conboy: external group reviews on tech. Avneesh - I did see some comments from you.

Avneesh Singh: Jason has some comments, which Wendy already corrected. He’s concerned about a non-normative reference to sync-media. It should be a recommendation or on the rec-track. Discussions in this group was that it’s possible to have a reference to a CG note, so if Ivan can provide a clarification…

Ivan Herman: Where should I make that comment?

Avneesh Singh: I copied you in the email. I will forward you the email.

Ivan Herman: I will - it goes beyond our charter to do that so we can’t do that right now.

Garth Conboy: Sounds like that is close to resolved, so that’s awesome. Ivan or Brady, and comments on Ping?

Brady Duga: I have not heard anything…

Garth Conboy: Is silence consent?

Ivan Herman: We have on record for Ping to reply

Brady Duga: I believe so, but I’m not sure what form we filled out. We filed a bug and shared it with them…

Ivan Herman: Once we are done with everything else and we’re ready to go to CR, if we are there, if they haven’t replied… but as far as I know, we did have discussions with them and we have no pending requests with them.

Garth Conboy: OK - that sounds promising.

Ivan Herman: the I18n officially have considered the review as complete

5. testing report

Garth Conboy: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nprN-8z2mRcmxkdWCN5Cz6-iNGl2BKCWQMxRZE2LbN4/edit#gid=0

Garth Conboy: Lastly, Benjamin is on the agenda for the testing report. Not sure if there’s a google doc that Benjamin wants to talk about - go…

Benjamin Young: https://github.com/apache/incubator-annotator/blob/master/test/data-model.js

Benjamin Young: The update I can give so far is that we think there is a path forward for using the web annotation tests.

Ivan Herman: +1 to bigbluehat if that works

Benjamin Young: The apache annotator project runs one or more JSON schemas against inputs given. The plan right now is to extract the pasted file - put it into our repo - then run a bunch of sample files against the schema

Benjamin Young: https://github.com/w3c/pub-manifest/tree/master/schema

Benjamin Young: there is a whole other task that would connect this to whatever reporting mechanism we want to use.
… I believe audiobooks may have it’s own schema

Garth Conboy: any other input? The document I pasted earlier, Wendy took the first pass of “Shoulds” and “Musts”… This is for pub manifest but this wants to get fleshed out for audiobooks… And maybe it has been…
… Maybe this is further fleshed out since last I looked at it, which will help drive testing.

Benjamin Young: One of the things this spreadsheet should provide relative to the items is what we define as a must/should that is beyond a schema. It won’t test processing algorithm conformance. We don’t have a way to know whether or not someone has done a proper internal representation. Those are some possibilities.

Ivan Herman: Just for those who may not have seen it, there’s a pretty cool addition to the editing environment. If you go to the editor’s draft, in the upper right-hand corner, one is ‘respec’ the other is ‘rec list’ - so on the left panel you have the TOC and a list of requirements of must/should and it extracts from the documents.

Garth Conboy: Which is going to be the source of truth?

Ivan Herman: the goal is to help to set up the right test cases - because it extracts what has to be tested.

Garth Conboy: Any other topics?

6. Resolutions