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Accessibility related discussions of the Publishing@W3C Groups
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Explain the metadata workflow in 2.2 #397

Closed mattgarrish closed 1 month ago

mattgarrish commented 2 months ago

I find section 2.2 in the principles, and its diagram, a bit confusing.

Does the digital publishing ecosystem really exist outside and before the processing of the metadata? Doesn't that encompass the vendor processing the metadata? If the first step is delivery, it probably should be the publisher who exists at the head of the flowchart as the one delivering the content.

Also, why is metadata delivered before it's defined in the accessibility metadata spec layer, for example? Wouldn't that be too late? (This is more a critique of this being a flowchart. I understand this layer describes what is coming in rather than being something the metadata flows through.)

I'm also not convinced the second layer is an accessibility metadata specification layer. "ONIX accessibility metadata" isn't a separate standard like the epub document; it's just part of onix. It feels more like a format description since the first step failed to mention the metadata comes in an onix record.

EPUBs also always have internal accessibility metadata and may also have an external record, but in certain supply chains the onix record has precedence (i.e., the delivery step makes it sound like one or the other, when one side is always true but not always used). I'm not sure how that's captured clearly, but maybe it's about the preference of the system ingesting the publication.

Also, the crosswalk is introduced when its too late to matter to the representation. (There also isn't a link to the crosswalk or a citation, so readers are left guessing about it.)

Finally, shouldn't the flowchart end with the metadata being presented to users, not with the principles document?

The description after the chart describes what the flowcharts shows but without a larger narrative about how metadata flows through each stage, what happens at that stage, and why it matters. The diagram should help depict that narrative visually, not leave readers to fill in the detail.

I think it would help to write out the workflow first and then try to match a workflow diagram to what you come up with.