Publishing WG Telco, 2018-11-05: TPAC memories, possible rechartering, use cases

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

TPAC

Wendy Reid wrote a nice blog post on TPAC summarizing the two days and the main outcomes.

Possible Rechartering

One of the pending issues (to be decided by the Business Group) is whether the WG would take up a standardization track for EPUB 3.2. If this indeed happens, the group will have to re-charter. The details of what Rec track would mean for EPUB 3.2 (testing methodology, tests, etc) will be the subject of discussions within the EPUB 3.2 CG, whose results should be brought into the WG if successfully recharter.

Rechartering would also include re-thinking the work on WPUB and related specs. One possible approach is to "modularize", having a slimmer document on the Web Publication Manifest, and dedicated standards for specific areas. Audiobooks is the first, comics, scholarly publishing, etc, may come later. Packaging may have to be delayed for the general case (though may be defined specifically for dedicated standards) hoping for the Web Packaging work to come to the fore. Decision must be taken on EPUB 4 (the messaging might be tricky with EPUB 3.2 also ongoing).

The details will have to be made in a new charter, to be drafted first by the Publ. champion, WG chairs, staff, and then publicly discussed before voting begins. The TAG's opinion may have to be sollicited, the role of the separate Publishing CG should be clarified (as a source of possible new technologies). This process will take several months...

Use Cases

The new version of the UCR makes the bridges between the use case requirements and the current text. There is a good match, and there are only 5 requirements that may not have a direct counterpart in the WP draft.

The work should continue in using these bounds to come up with a clear statements on affordances, ie, answering to the question "what should the User Agents do?".