Publishing WG Telco, 2018-08-20: implementations, access mode sufficient, canonical manifest, TOC

See minutes online for a more detailed record of the discussions.

New draft published

A new version of the WPUB draft has been published: main difference is an updated WebIDL.

Implementations

There has been some implementation works: JSON Schema, and a proof-of-concept conversion of manifest. Both have contributed to the update of the draft, also raising minor issues for making things more precise. These are reflected in the new draft.

accessModeSufficient issues

This accessibility term did not have a precise enough definition in the draft: it should be an array of strings, each being a comma separated list of terms. A further issues is that while the schema.org discussions have concluded in this, the examples on the schema.org site are erronuous.

There is now a PR on github to handle that (which will be merged now) and, in parallel, actions have been started to get the schema.org examples updated.

Canonical Manifest

We inherited great flexibility from schema.org and the need to make authoring easier the manifest in JSON(-LD). Eg, can have a name whose value can be a simple string but also an array of strings, for creators a value can be a string, and array of strings, and each element in the string a Person object, etc. The goal is to make it simple for the authors to create simple manifests. However, this makes implementations a bit more complex. What is proposed (in a separate PR) is the concept of a "Canonical" Manifest, that removes all these ambiguities, as well as a precise conversion of a manifest into such a canonical one. Having this makes the task of implementations clearer, removes possible ambiguities and increases the interoperability on that step.

Issues around TOC

There is an open issue around TOC: whilst the current draft simply contains a reference to locate an (HTML) element in one of the resources for a TOC, is there is need for the definition of a more detailed structure? The opinions converge a log: whereas the EPUB tradition may require a more detailed structure, the Web traditions avoid imposing a rigid structures.

The discussion is still ongoing, with currently no consensus: to be continued…