Re: Deep concerns about the future of EPUB

On Tue, 2018-01-02 at 17:15 +0100, Daniel Glazman wrote:
> Le 02/01/2018 à 17:09, Ruffilo, Nick a écrit :
> 
> > Daniel,
> > 
> > So your take on “who owns creating these “style guides”” would then
> > be publishers or some organization like the IDPF, and not the
> > W3C.  
> 
> The IDPF does not exist any more. And I doubt publishers will work on
> it. I think external authors will play a role there if and only if
> our specs are of good quality and if there's an incentive to write a
> book, i.e. potential buyers.
+1 although thre are domain associations such as AMS and ACH and STM
Assoc. that might.

> > My understanding was that – at least with the W3C Digital
> > Publishing group – the goal was to figure out where the existing
> > web technologies are lacking a specific publisher/publishing
> > related need, and then determining a solution for that (and if the
> > solution is a new spec, so be it).
> 
> We make solutions on the technical side. Even the CG is not Chartered
> to work on know-hows or tutorials. This is just not our job.

I don't agree with the last sentence here. It's a job that in most
areas -- WAI is an exception -- W3C has been appallingly bad, and part
of that is we don't tend to attract the sort of technical writers and
communicators we would need, or, when we do, we don't manage to keep
them. CSS is better than most at straddling that gap.

It's often thought that the primary audience of a spec is implementors
(e.g. browser developers), but jouralists, writers, analysts need to
understand it, or it dies. I've seen groups decide to have a tutorial
or primer so that they don't need to spend as much effort in making the
specification comprehensible - and regardless of whether they produce
the primer, it's a kiss of death for a spec to take that attitude. The
outreach needs to be part of the work at every level.

But it needs also to be inreach. Try doing things like holding one-day
workshops at events like the ebookcraft conference where people try &
make a PWP and take the experience back to the WG. Maybe if we move to
having two TPACs a year we could have an event where education
publishers can talk to book reader makers about how footnotes need to
work, about shared page number references for classroom use, about
persistent storage for end-of-chapter quizzes, about cross-book links
that update automatically when you have the target book, about cross-
book search, and where W3C peope can talk about new 3.1 features like
accessibility changes (and why that matters), and how to track users
for in-book ads with the new remote-hosted script feature, as well as
sending back analytics to publishers. All the sort of things that will
drive a market that's stagnating.

Oops, sorry ,maybe that's a bit of a rant. But i don't agree it's not
our (collective) job to communicate about our work.  We do need to make
it clearer, and maybe to create more infrastructure to support that
two-way flow of information, though.


-- 
Liam Quin, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Staff contact for Verifiable Claims WG, SVG WG, XQuery WG

Web slave for http://www.fromoldbooks.org/

Received on Tuesday, 2 January 2018 21:01:47 UTC