Closing the Digital Publishing Interest Group

Dear all,

At the end of the month the Digital Publishing Interest Group's charter will expire and, based on our earlier discussions and the decision of the W3C Management, the Interest Group will indeed close down.

Just as at any time a group closes it is worth spending a few minutes remembering history, in particular for a group that played, in my view, such a seminal role. It is almost five (yes, five!) years ago when we held our first joint workshop with the IDPF in New York[1], which led to the creation of the Digital Publishing Activity and the Digital Publishing Interest Group. That Workshop was, in many respect, the first time two related but also almost disjoint communities met: the Publishing community, mostly gathered around EPUB, and the Web Developers' community, mostly around W3C. It was a long overdue event for all the reasons we know on the common technological interests of the two communities (remember Jeff Jaffe's slides at the TOC event on "Web=Publishing"?). It was certainly one of the most interesting events I participated in, so far, at W3C.

This led to the DPUB IG. Looking back on its four years’ work, I do believe it was successful fulfilling its most important goal: create long-lasting and stable contacts among these communities. Beyond the several documents it has published over the years[2] it could formulate new perspectives, create new relationships, started new technical work that are now reflected in the work of the Publishing Business and Working Groups, it has contributed to the discussions at W3C on accessibility, layout, or metadata and, last but not least, it has laid the groundwork for what is now known as Publishing@W3C, born out of the merge of IDPF and W3C. I think we can be proud of what we have achieved.

Lots of people, some of whom have gone to other areas, contributed to the success.  A number of people acted either as co-editors for the documents we produced over the years, or co-chairs of the various task forces; I do not even make an attempt to list them all, incurring the danger of forgetting someone. But I think we should all thank the successive co-chairs of the Interest Group: Markus Gylling, Madi Solomon, Liza Daly, Tzviya Siegman, and Garth Conboy. Thank you for your dedication and hard work! And thank to all the participants over the years.


Ivan

[1] https://www.w3.org/2012/08/electronic-books/
[2] https://www.w3.org/dpub/IG/wiki/Main_Page



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Ivan Herman, W3C 
Publishing@W3C Technical Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
mobile: +31-641044153
ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704

Received on Wednesday, 27 September 2017 13:57:10 UTC