Subject: [arcmedia] W3C Digital Publishing Interest Group and the arcmedia WG

From: Heather Flanagan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 01 Jun 2015 13:58:13 -0700

Hello all,

The W3C's Digital Publishing Interest Group (DPUB; no, not DPIG; yes,
I know it's funny) has been discussing the requirements for packaging
content on the web. They are definitely interested in the work
arcmedia is aiming to accomplish; the less reinvention of wheels, the
better.

Here's a summary of notes and links from a recent meeting that
describes a bit where they are going with packaging:

- ---
Tzviya Siegman presented some slides
<http://w3c.github.io/dpub/PackageDPUBF2F/index.html> to start the
discussion on packaging, motivated by the future vision on EPUB-WEB.
The goal is to gather a detailed set of requirements on what type of
packaging is needed for the purpose of Digital Publishing and
EPUB-WEB. At the moment, EPUB is based on OCF, derived from ZIP; other
proposals coming to the fore are based, e.g., on multipart mime.

A significant part of the discussion was on the issue whether, for
EPUB-WEB, there is a real need for packaging in the first place. Some
evolution in the area of Web Applications which, hitherto, considered
packaging, are now looking at other directions, like the usage of
Service Workers, that may make a specific packaging format
unnecessary. There was a consensus that, after all, some sort of a
packaging is necessary. However, the coming months should concentrate
on defining functional requirements for packaging, as a first step of
moving forward. A first draft of such functional requirements is
available
<https://www.w3.org/dpub/IG/wiki/Functional_Requirements#Functional_Requ
irements_for_Packaging_Spec>and
will have to be worked on.
- ---

I thought this might be of interest.
- -Heather