Re: EPUB Road Map

It also depends on what we mean by living standard.
Right now there is no living standard process in W3C. Work is going on on proposals. 

I think it would be good to wait for proposals to come out and then evaluate if it suits the needs of EPUB 3 road map.


With regards
Avneesh

From: Laurent Le Meur 
Sent: Wednesday, August 7, 2019 19:40
To: Dave Cramer 
Cc: W3C EPUB3 Community Group 
Subject: Re: EPUB Road Map

Hi,  

Because (X)HTML 5 is a living standard, this would make sense for EPUB 3 to be also a living standard and it would give publishers, distributors and application developers the feeling of stability for EPUB 3 they badly need.

When a snapshot has to be built, for instance to create an equivalence with the ISO EPUB spec, this can still be done via a publication date or a minor version, but in the latter case the communication would still be on "EPUB 3", not on a specific EPUB 3.x.

re. possible revision to EPUB 3, ok for adding core media types of similar updates, to be discussed by the CG and BG; 
but opening EPUB 3 to pure HTML would be a nightmare (for EPUB Check and many reading systems especially). 

Laurent 


  Le 6 août 2019 à 18:26, Dave Cramer <dauwhe@gmail.com> a écrit :

  Now that EPUB 3.2 has been published, what's next for EPUB? This will be discussed in the CG call this Thursday (agenda forthcoming) but it's a big question (or a bunch of questions), and I hope discussion will extend beyond the CG calls. Some thoughts:


  1. How should EPUB 3 be maintained? I personally thing EPUB 3.X is a good candidate to become a living standard in the manner of HTML. I also wonder the specs be easier to read and maintain if written in a different way, for example Matt's suggestion to separate reading system conformance from content conformance? 


  2. What, if anything, needs to be added or changed in EPUB 3? There are some possible changes that would not invalidate any existing EPUB, such as adding opus as a core media type or allowing the HTML serialization. But what new features are driven by business needs? And how do we balance a desire for new features against the costs of supporting them? There is value in a stable spec, and I don't want to spend the rest of my life on EPUB 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10… 


  By chance, I ran across the original EPUB 3 Charter (http://idpf.org/epub/30/wg-charter) this morning. Written in 2010, it described fourteen goals for what turned out to be EPUB 3.0. Nine years later, which of these goals have we met? What new goals would we add?

  3. What should we do about all the EPUB satellite specs? The IDPF published nearly a dozen specs, which have largely not been implemented by reading systems or used by content authors. Should some of these be revived? Should some of these be abandoned?

  Thanks,

  Dave