update on proposed Tokyo workshop in September

As you all know, a W3C workshop in Tokyo for September, hosted by the
Advanced Publishing Lab (APL) recently formed within Keio,  has been in the
planning process for some time with a major purpose being to get Japanese
publishing industry folks more excited and involved in W3C work.

 

There's been some debate about scope mainly among the APL/Japan
stakeholders. Originally it was going to be limited to manga/comics but that
seemed too narrow, it was proposed to cover exclusively FXL content but that
seemed not quite meaty enough in terms of potentially motivating new work
(which is what workshops are supposed to do). It was then proposed to be
about informing publishers about latest relevant developments in the CSS and
the rest of Open Web Platform, but that seemed too broad/informational for a
workshop. There has also been concern to not overlap with work going on in
EPUB 3 CG or Pub WG.  In the last few days a consensus has emerged to focus
on the topic of layout & presentation of visually rich publications,
including both fixed and dynamic formatting. So CSS would be at the center
of things. See [1] for the work-in-progress on defining the scope etc.  Of
course the specific agenda will depend on who answers the call for
proposals.

 

We would dovetail the Tokyo workshop with a half-day symposium, organized by
a partner organization (Japanese Electronic Publishing Association - JEPA).
That will be in Japanese (with translations for foreign speakers) and
focused on being informational in nature.

 

Ivan and I are reasonably content that this plan is our best bet in terms of
doing something both useful and successful in Tokyo. There's lot of
unfinished business in CSS area in terms of publishing needs and this is
completely orthogonal to EPUB 3 CG and Pub WG. And, critically, the Japan
publishing community that's adopted EPUB 3 is quite nervous about disruptive
change and CSS improvements can be incrementally supported within existing
EPUB 3 workflows, so this provides a way to potentially deliver some useful
new value to the ecosystem without waiting for (P)WP/EPUB4. Whether we can
truly get a critical mass of global stakeholders to Japan in September is
not 100% clear but it seems at least plausible based on what we know of
folks schedules and interests.

 

Feedback solicited before this gets shared more widely. A next step would be
internal approval by W3C management (W3M). We could en route share this with
the overall PBG as long as it was made clear that it wasn't 100% approved
yet, or we could wait a couple weeks until it's a definite "go".

 

Dave we would love to have you on the program committee and, ideally, in
Tokyo (you could still be on the PC even if you weren't able to make it).

 

We can discuss more today if there's an SC call (?) and/or please send
comments via email.


Thanks,

 

--Bill

 

[1]
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wExl8Cxh8kMhzZu5UrWLhspMU2ZmGA6Wz3pmjtWQ
5eY/edit?usp=sharing