Re: Comments on eBooks/Digital Publishing draft charters

Daniel,

thanks for your thorough review!

If you do not mind, I will just store this review now, without doing any change on the text itself; because a number of people are busy reviewing the text, it would create problems if we changed the text under their feet, so to say. Besides, others may have comments on your comments....

Consequently, my answers below are just my first reactions, but the final answer, in the form of a clear text editing, would come later.

With that, see below...

On Mar 11, 2013, at 11:41 , Daniel Glazman <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com> wrote:

> As requested, my comments on the two draft charters:
> 
> - I think the Digital Publishing one makes more sense than
>  the eBooks only one; the Press faces the same issues the eBooks
>  world faces. My comments below will then be based on that
>  document.
> 

We already received several comments on this, in line with yours. One of the ideas that did come up was to make explicit in the Charter that the IG may decide to set up Task Forces to concentrate on journal or ebook issues, although this decision belongs to the IG.


> - in section 1, EPUB3 is not an "upcoming" standard. It's already
>  a Standard, in status equivalent to W3C RECs. Work on revision 3.01
>  just started at IDPF.
> 

Absolutely true. 


> - in section 1, I would add the following right before sentence starting
>  with "Although that Workshop...":
> 
>    More specifically, the EPUB3 Standard relies on some W3C
>    technologies that have not reached a stable state yet; some of them
>    are already Candidate Recommendations but some others are still
>    Working Drafts, considered unstable by W3C Process.
> 

Ok, understood.


> - in section 1.1, I have concerns about the last item: this
>  can be only about the bits existing in non-W3C specs that don't exist
>  in W3C specs yet. Examples: epub:type attributes, -epub-* extensions
>  to CSS, etc.

You mean the item starting with "Members of the Interest Group join the relevant Working Groups...", right? Those are clearly the primary target, but isn't it possible that existing, but not finalized features would also benefit from these members' contribution? I agree that the text is not clear, though.

> 
> - in my mind, an Interest Group here is only a temporary shell
>  created to bootstrap something. In that perspective, I'm not sure the
>  second item is the most important thing here. I think a better
>  criterion would be the creation of productive and stable *technical*
>  liaisons between the digital publishing industry and the W3C WGs. In
>  particular, a clear success criterion for me is a creation of a clear
>  liaison process explaining how external standards bodies can ping W3C
>  and how W3C can request input or comments from external standard
>  bodies after the success and shutdown of the IG. Who, how, where.

Ok, I understand and this binds back to your earlier comment on referring to external organizations. I am not sure yet how this will be formulated...

> 
> - I would revamp entirely section 2; please focus more on the intent
>  than on the precise wording below:
> 
>  The deliverables include:
> 
>  1 a comprehensive list of technologies used by the Digital Publishing
>    industry and missing from current W3C specs; each technology should
>    name a potential W3C WG host for the technical discussion. A
>    document with technical designs and corresponding
>    use cases will be drafted for submission to the corresponding WGs.
>    Existing tests suites will be attached to the document.
>    This document should be published as one or several W3C Interest
>    Group Notes.
>    It is important to understand that this will remain an ongoing
>    effort and that the list should be updated even after the shutdown
>    of the IG.
> 
>  2 a comprehensive and *prioritized* list of W3C specifications that
>    are important to the digital publishing industry but are still in
>    unstable state in W3C. A collection of use cases will be attached to
>    that list. This document should be published as one or several W3C
>    Interest Group Notes.
>    It is important to understand that this will remain an ongoing
>    effort and that the list should be updated even after the shutdown
>    of the IG.
> 

Ok, I do not have a particular problem with these two, and they sound good. However, I would still prefer to separate the test suite issue as an explicit point. Indeed, I think it would also be valuable if the IG could contribute to the overall W3C testing efforts of, for example, HTML5. It should be possible to use those tests from ebook readers, too, and not only from browsers, for example (whenever applicable). I think that calling this out as a very explicit third bullet point is valuable.


> - isn't a 2 years' life for such an IG a lot?

To be honest, we did not give much thoughts to the length of the IG (just like the chairs or the staff contact is also pending). Let us decide on that when the rest of the charter is done.

Daniel, thanks a lot for this; I really appreciate that you used your vacation time for this...

Cheers

Ivan


> 
> </Daniel>


----
Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
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Received on Monday, 11 March 2013 12:30:35 UTC