DPUB IG Telco, 2016-06-13: CSS WG, priorities

See minutes online for a more detailed record of the discussions. (The headers below link into the relevant sections of the minutes.)

CSS F2F meeting report

Dave Cramer gave a report of the recent CSS WG F2F meeting, that took place in San Francisco. The main point of interest for this group are:

• Flexbox and grid. Both of these have evolved significantly. Flexbox is now in CR and grids has also evolved a lot.
• Alt text in generated content. Generated content has been picked up again, and it will include the possibility to add "alt" text to it. Although this is still a complex issue, the goal is to improve the accessibility aspects of generated content
• Discussions on baseline grids, to control alignment of stuff across pages and columns. This, and another feature called hanging punctuation. Both are important for, eg, CJK languages.

CSS Priorities' document

There is a document on CSS priorities that the group has started to edit. The goal was to come up with a wish-list of things the publication community would like to be able to do but cannot do. However, it is fairly difficult to get these points onto the CSS WG's agenda, and a simple listing of priorities will not really cut it. The problem is that the browser developers will see this as a theoretical thing, and dismiss it, unless there is someone who is trying to build something but coming up with a roadblock. What really counts and makes people think and move is people come not only with wishes, but some sort of implementations - polyfills or not - is how groups like CSS operate.

There were some discussion on the call on, e.g., how to "use" and cooperate with the Readium consortium, how to get more input, etc; the discussion will continue on subsequent calls.