summary of recent DPUB meetings

Hi All,

I put this summary of DPUB activity together for my colleagues and thought some of you might find it helpful for your colleagues:

Co-chair: Madi Salomon of Pearson stepped down as co-chair because of changes in responsibilities in her day job. Liza Daly of Safari Books Online joins Markus Gylling of IDPF and DAISY as co-chair.

The W3C Digital Publishing Interest Group has several task forces, listed on the groups' wiki<http://www.w3.org/dpub/IG/wiki/Main_Page>. Each task force is led by a member of the IG. We are prioritizing the work of the task forces more by what can be accomplished than by urgency at this point. I will highlight the most active groups.


Latinreq (formerly pagination): This group is focusing on print and digital layout using HTML and CSS (as opposed to layout tools like InDesign or XML-based workflow). Requirements are being gathered for additions to CSS in (see http://w3c.github.io/dpub-pagination/). This group gets detailed. See http://blogs.adobe.com/webplatform/2014/02/05/baseline-grids-for-the-web/ for a blog post inspired by discussions in this forum.

Annotations and Social Reading: Working in conjunction with the EPUB Annotations Group and the larger W3C Annotations WG. There is a large body of use case running the gamut from author-provided notes to formal annotations of published of works. Right now many web annotations are managed by 3rd parties, such as Facebook or Disqus and not actually associated with the content. This is an effort to maintain the relationship between annotation and content as well as define the large world of annotations. This touches on many topics including identifiers (to what is an annotation linked?), storage (what happens to the annotation if the content to which the annotation is linked changes or is deleted?). From a W3C perspective, annotations includes footnotes. A workshop<http://www.w3.org/blog/dpub/2014/02/06/upcoming-workshop-on-web-annotations-footnotes-comments-bookmarks-and-marginalia-on-the-web/> on annotations was just announced for April in San Francisco. A position paper is required for attendance.

Accessibility and Personalization: Accessible publishing goes well beyond image descriptions. A large set of use cases has been gathered. Many of the use cases focus on education content and testing, but there are several that are much broader (sonification of SVG, multiple math pronunciations, standardized templates for alt text, accessible interactive widgets, tracking personalized data to allow for personalized preferences while reading). This is a very broad category that overlaps with every other task force.

Behavioral UI: This group is looking at where the open web platform has applied "extensions" in order to achieve some interaction or behavioral goal. There are use cases from reading systems that already do this, such as pop up notes or continuous background sound track for a book. There are also use cases taken from IDPF and retailer specs and general wish lists, such as tapping on an index term to open a view (pop up/second screen) of the content to which the index refers and linking a specific dictionary to a publication. This allows a reader to use a technical dictionary while reading physics books and a bilingual dictionary while reading Anna Karenina in the original. This group will explore formalizing and broadening the IDPF's structural semantic vocabulary<http://www.idpf.org/epub/vocab/structure/> into an extension of HTML. This extension will allow for valid XHTML with digital publishing-specific markup.

Metadata: Looking at what is missing from supply chain metadata (as opposed to library metadata, which is out of scope at this point). This group is getting started, and it looks like the initial focus will be on issues such as granular and descriptive metadata. There is a need for metadata from a content management perspective as well as a distribution perspective. I recommend looking at the task force's wiki page<http://www.w3.org/dpub/IG/wiki/Task_Forces/Metadata>, where a lot of discussion and thinking out loud has occurred.  After the groups gets a clearer picture of what it would like to accomplish, we will likely have guest appearances at meetings Dan Brickley of schema.org. Ivan Herman, the W3C staff lead for the group coordinates the W3C semantic web activity and is a resident expert RDF, RDFa, OWL, etc.

This group is also asked to review draft W3C documentation. Typically, 1 to 3 qualified members volunteer to read and comment on a document on behalf of the group. For example, Dave Cramer (Hachette Book Group) and Brady Duga (Google) commented on http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-shapes/, an addition to CSS allowing for floats in specific shapes.

The minutes for every meeting are publically available at http://www.w3.org/dpub/IG/wiki/Meetings.

Feedback, use cases, complaints about the state of digital publishing are welcome.

Thanks,
Tzviya


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Tzviya Siegman * Senior Content Technology Specialist * Wiley Content Management * John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
111 River Street, MS 5-02 * Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774 * 201-748-6884 * tsiegman@wiley.com<mailto:tsiegman@wiley.com>