W3C's Publishing Community: An update and call to action

On July 27, 2020, the digital publishing community gathered for an online update from the W3C and its publishing activities. As I missed catching up with W3C representatives at the COVID cancelled Tech Forum 2020, I made sure I was there.

This past July, the digital publishing community gathered for an online update from the @W3C. In this blog post, @BookNet_Canada's Lauren Stewart shares some of the meeting highlights.
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What’s the W3C and what do they have to do with publishing?

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops web standards. It established the Publishing Working Group, which oversaw the creation of the audiobooks specification and the publication manifest and is closing in September 2020. It currently oversees these groups:

• the Publishing Business Group: identifies and discusses business needs and use cases;

• the Publishing Community Group: incubates new ideas to direct to working groups; and

• the Publishing Steering Committee: oversees all publishing activities at the W3C.

This structure helps support traditional and digital-first publishing work on and with the web, ensuring that the EPUB standard is widely adopted and supported, that EPUBCheck thrives, and to drive innovation. Ideas are bubbled up by publishing professionals in technical and non-technical roles, prioritization occurs, and the work begins.

As a part of that process, in February and March 2020 the W3C fielded an EPUB survey, with the goal to better understand how the publishing community uses EPUB 3 and to identify needs and anticipate work to be done. Among the results, the following stood out:

• 84% of respondent publishers use EPUB3 as their primary format for digital books

• 84% of respondent publishers use EPUBCheck/reading systems for testing

• respondents report difficulty implementing high-design or complicated layouts

• respondents struggle with existing production tools that do not produce files that can be maintained long-term

• reading systems are considered the block for creating best-in-class EPUBs but respondents were interested in documentation, implementation, and testing for EPUB3

• levels of accessibility awareness and implementation plans were both reported as high, although challenges with documentation, testing and validation are widespread

The W3C has absorbed the feedback from the survey and is launching the EPUB3 Working Group in September 2020, which will focus on reading system conformance, test suite, errata, accessibility and backward compatibility, and supporting modern web standards in EPUB (ex. HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript). Through collaboration with the aforementioned Publishing Community, the Working Group will be able to advance the specification while being supported with the development of best practices.

All that to say that the Publishing Community Group needs more voices in order to funnel ideas to proposals for working groups. Acting as a bridge between publishing and technical colleagues, this group is intended to identify shared challenges: business issues that can be resolved with technology. This process requires involvement from participants across the diverse publishing landscape, reflecting the demographic, cultural, technological, and economic diversity that must be considered in the development of specifications and standards.

Call to action: join the W3C’s Publishing Community Group

As Mateus Manço Teixeira from W. W. Norton extolled at the webinar:

Solutions that work for one business may not work for all.

Features that seem inclusive to an audience may be inaccessible to others.

Technologies that are infallible in one language may be clunky globally.

For good standards work, broad community engagement is critical.

If you can contribute to the digital publishing ecosystem, here’s your opportunity.