Publishing WG Telco, 2018-11-26: TOC

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

The meeting was fully on the issue of Table of Contents (a.k.a. TOC), which is the subject of two different issues: #291 and #350. These two issues have been open for a very long time.

The agenda of the call includes a short explainer (at the end of the mail) on where the discussion has gone over the months, and what are the open issues. Two of the questions, listed in the explainer, have been resolved, namely:

Is there a need to define, and make accessible from the manifest, an HTML-based structured TOC, usable to extract a simple hierarchical data structures containing labels and links?

The resolution accepted at the call is:

The WP manifest will have a reference to a machine-readable TOC, the draft will have to define the HTML structure for it. The TOC is recommended. There should be documentation in the spec on how that TOC is to be used by Reading Systems and Authors.

The "machine-readable HTML structure" structure, at first, will be based on the EPUB Navigation Document Specification though it may still evolve.

The second question was:

Is there a need to make accessible from the manifest the reference to a visual TOC, without any restriction on what that reference would contain?

The resolution at the call:

Close issue #350, possibly replace it with a more general notion of landmarks.

The third question, namely

Is there a need to allow the author to express the (structured) TOC directly in the manifest as a data structure in JSON?

was not discussed due to time; the agreement is that these open issues will be closed, and a new issue will be opened concentrating on this question only.