Re: Reviving the CSS Print community group

Globally, there seems to be a lot of will and energy to make things 
happen. However, from outside the W3C & CSSWG it is sometimes difficult 
to understand where to start and where to participate. (It can also be 
intimidating)

Would a good way to start be to organize the repo of this WG? We could 
have dedicated folder’s to write tests in, discuss in detail some 
aspects of the current spec that need to be improved and propose larger 
specs (like notes, page floats, grid templates for pages, etc.)
This work would allow us to propose things more clearly to the CSSWG.

Some things have already been done in various ways. Maybe we should 
start by putting things together. Do you think it would be possible to 
organize a day or two of work on this for those interested?


There are many things that are said in parallel on several 
conversations. I take the liberty of responding to some of the 
discussions in this same message.

Following Dave message:

 > 1. As mentioned, provide a showcase for CSS print with a CSS Zen 
Garden-like approach. Random thought for content: the “CSS” article in 
(English) Wikipedia. It has tables, footnotes, a couple of photographs, 
lots of headings… and if some enterprising person were to improve the 
page to make it more fun to work with, all the better!

Like this idea.
There are several questions to answer about the "CSS page garden":

Would the HTML be taken by people from the wikipedia article itself 
(with revisions and differences from one submission to another) or 
should a stabilized common HTML be provided? ?

Where would the site be hosted? Would the proposals be sent via a git repo?

It seems to me that people should be asked to provide several things:
- the source code
- the generated PDF
- indicate with which tool/browser (version and operating system) the 
sample PDF was generated. At the moment, there are too many differences 
from one platform to another.



Following Florian message:

 > I don’t know how to break the chicken&egg problem of having not 
enough users be cause there nothing to be used vs having not enough 
implementor interest because there’s no user. But having tried to crack 
it at the spec level before, I now think that this is not where the 
solution is.
One way or another, we have to make enough people care.

I think things have been moving in the last 3 years. In France, Belgium 
and the Netherlands, I see a growing interest for CSS print. A growing 
community of graphic designers are doing projects with CSS print.  The 
problem is that these are initiatives that are quite independent of 
publishing groups or technological solutions. This makes them quite 
invisible from groups like the W3C.

There are initiatives to make this work more visible but rather 
addressed to graphic designers:
- https://prepostprint.org → PrePostPrint highlights experimental 
publications made with free software. (Lot with web tools)
- http://2print.org → Printed editions produced with open source and web 
tools: a physical and mobile archive for schools, libraries and 
exhibition places.
- https://varia.zone/en/publishing-partyline.html


Following Guillaume message:

 > As an open-source implementation maintainer we prefer to stick to the 
standard, but not because we’re developing open-source software. The 
main reasons are:
- it’s easier to implement features that are already specified,
- it’s possible to compare the documents we generate with what the other 
tools generate,
- it’s easier to tell our clients to follow what’s on W3C’s 
specifications or on MDN than to write our own 
specifications/documentations.

+ 1 totally agree with that. This is also a point of view we have at 
Paged.js. I would also add that we believe that improvements must be 
driven by the community and discussed to reach a consensus (even if it 
is difficult to reach) in order to have quality technical proposals

Julie


Le 01/11/2022 à 13:15, Guillaume Ayoub a écrit :
> Hi!
>
> Le dim. 30 oct. 2022 à 23:47:08 -04:00:00, Liam R. E. Quin 
> <liam@fromoldbooks.org> a écrit :
>> On Mon, 2022-10-31 at 03:26 +0100, Julie Blanc wrote:
>>>
>>>  We have begun work in this direction:

>>> https://github.com/w3c/css-print/issues/3
��
>>
>> The proposal is very interesting - i was super pleased to see it when
>> you posted it.
>
> +1, that was really interesting. What would be the next step to 
> transform it into an official working draft?
>
> >The CSS print community group needs to think about how to bring more 
> people into the discussion. It would be great to have more proposals 
> and to be able to discuss with CSSWG. I’m motivated to have these 
> discussions and do things. Without putting in opposition commercial 
> vendors / open-source solutions (especially about extensions because 
> it’s not that simple).
>
> We (CourtBouillon) would be available to make proof of concepts of 
> proposals in WeasyPrint, so that we can give feedback about what’s 
> quite easily doable (at least for us), report outstanding 
> implementation issues and help these new features to be included in 
> specifications.
>
> >First, the commercial vendors which implement the „standards“ around 
> PrintCSS aka CSS Paged Media together with their own _useful_ 
> extensions which are needed for professional projects.
>
> >Second, the open-source solutions that in my experience stick 
> strictly to the W3C „standards“ and trying to
> avoid any kind of extensions.
>
> As an open-source implementation maintainer we prefer to stick to the 
> standard, but not because we’re developing open-source software. The 
> main reasons are:
> - it’s easier to implement features that are already specified,
> - it’s possible to compare the documents we generate with what the 
> other tools generate,
> - it’s easier to tell our clients to follow what’s on W3C’s 
> specifications or on MDN than to write our own 
> specifications/documentations.
> 

>Also, the idea of a CSS zen garden for paged media would be really 
> close to the original CSS zen garden and more focused on examples 
> proposed by graphic designers from the same content (a book?). This 
> seems different from the links shared by Andreas

.
>
> We also like the idea of a CSS zen garden. If everyone’s OK with 
> creating such a web platform, it would be a pleasure to work on it 
> with you!
>
> We have a sample of two books generated from the same HTML file but 
> with different stylesheets, and other equivalent examples whose 
> mock-ups have been created by a graphic designer. They are quite 
> simple examples, but they’re nice for newcomers to discover what’s 
> possible with HTML and CSS.
>
> https://weasyprint.org/#samples
> https://github.com/CourtBouillon/weasyprint-samples
>
>
> On a different topic, we’re currently working on a tool based on 
> web-platform-tests (WPT) to use the W3C test suites with non-browsers 
> and include the results of these tests on the "official" platform. We 
> hope that it will help paged-based renderers to become first-class 
> citizens and improve interoperability. If anyone’s interested about 
> this topic, there’s an open GitHub issue: 
> https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt.fyi/issues/2893
>
>
> Cheers,
-- 
*Julie Blanc*
+33 (0)6 31 51 36 55
julie-blanc.fr <http://julie-blanc.fr/>
@julieblancfr <https://twitter.com/julieblancfr>

⟡ PhD student at ArTeC, University of Paris 8 and EnsadLab-PSL
⟡ Working on Paged.js
⟡ President of Design en Recherche <https://designenrecherche.org/>