iherman commented 2 years ago

Document title, URLs, estimated publication date

EPUB 3.3
- URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/epub-33/
- Long URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/2022/CR-epub-33-20220505/
- Editor's Draft: https://w3c.github.io/epub-specs/epub33/core/
- Estimated Publication date: 2022-05-05
EPUB 3.3 Reading Systems
- URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/epub-rs-33/
- Long URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/2022/CR-epub-rs-33-20220505/
- Editor's Draft: https://w3c.github.io/epub-specs/epub33/rs/
- Estimated Publication date: 2022-05-05
EPUB Accessibility 1.1
- URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/epub-a11y-11/
- Long URL: https://www.w3.org/TR/2022/CR-epub-a11y-11-20220505/
- Editor's Draft: https://w3c.github.io/epub-specs/epub33/a11y/
- Estimated Publication date: 2022-05-05

(The documents are not yet installed on /TR, please look at either the editors' drafts or using the short names.)

Abstract

Status

Link to group's decision to request transition

https://www.w3.org/publishing/groups/epub-wg/Meetings/Minutes/2022-04-08-epub#resolution4

Note: that resolution was made on the 8th of April, and a 5 business day window was announced for objections. That period is over on April 15, at noon Boston time.

Changes

Minimum deadline for CR comments

2022-10-30

Requirements satisfied

Quoting from the main requirements in the WG charter:

[…] the interoperability of EPUB 3 content, and the conformance of EPUB 3 reading systems, remain a serious issue. There is a need for a more rigorous and comprehensive testing of EPUB 3; this may also mean the need for a further clarification of the standard text itself. […] The EPUB 3 Working Group will advance, refine, and clarify the EPUB 3 standard to ensure its relevance as digital publishing continues to evolve, and specify a comprehensive testing environment for EPUB 3.

The WG has:

Reviewed, restructured, and updated the former EPUB 3.2 documents and made numerous changes to the texts for clarification, handling possible specification bugs, to make the specifications more precise. Although the change logs show many issues that have been handled (the change logs, together, contain references for over 120 substantial issues, i.e., these do not account for the purely editorial changes) only a handful of those are genuinely new technical features, mostly to answer to internationalization and to security issues.
The working group has set up a functional testing environment to contribute to the interoperability of EPUB Reading System. At present the list of tests contains around 120 individual tests which concentrate on the EPUB specific features (i.e., not including, say, HTML tests), and this number is expected to be growing during the CR period.

The WG believes that fully satisfied the requirement for the clarifications needed in the specification, as well as specifying a comprehensive testing environment.

Dependencies met (or not)

There were no major dependencies.

Wide Review

Horizontal reviews:

See horizontal review tracker

A11y review:
- mail from Janina
- a11y review issues by jasonjgw (all closed)
- Joint TPAC meeting with APA (all closed)
I18N review:
- mail from Fuxiao
- i18n-tracker issues (all closed)
- i18n-needs-resolution issues (all closed)
Privacy/Security review:
- privacy tracker issues
- Joint TPAC meeting with PING
- WG Call with PING participation, 2021-10-28
- WG Call with PING participation, 2022-01-28
- Privacy issues (all closed from the WG's point of view but never answered by PING)
- Security issues (all closed from the WG's point of view but never answered by PING)
TAG review:
- Issue on the WG repository
- Issue on the TAG repository, explicitly closed by the TAG

The WG discussions were conducted through github issues. The group took over the repository used to develop earlier versions of EPUB, and that meant ≈100 open issues at the time the Working Group started (September 2020); some of those were around for years. During the lifetime of the Working Group ≈400 issues were added, coming both from the wider community and the Working Group itself, with the participation of experts outside the group.

Issues addressed

The change log items listing the substantial changes, i.e.:

include references to the issues that were addressed by those changes.

Formal Objections

None.

Implementation

The exit criteria of the Working Group are described in:

https://w3c.github.io/epub-specs/epub33/reports/exit_criteria.html

with links to the report documents that will, eventually, contain the results of testing.

There are numerous EPUB 3 Reading System implementations on the market, some major ones are represented on the Working Group (Google, Apple, Kobo, EDRLab, VitalSource, Colibrio, etc.). We expect most of these will contribute to the test results. Also, the group has numerous contacts with Publishers, as well as accessibility organizations, who can contribute to the CR testing of, e.g., vocabularies.

Finally, there is a strong cooperation between the Working Group and the developers of epubcheck, that already has a beta version of an EPUB 3.3 checker. (This is particularly important, because epubcheck is used by virtually all publishers before releasing a new publication.)

We expect the CR period open until the end of December 2022.

Patent disclosures

https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/epub/ipr

Additional note on CR exit

The Working Group's charter has a very strong clause on backward compatibility:

Any existing valid EPUB 3.2 should remain valid under EPUB 3.X, unless it relies on features discovered to have serious issues (such as a security bug).

What this means that the usual CR approach, whereby if a feature does not get the right number of implementation per the exit criteria must be removed from the specification, cannot be applied in this case. Instead, the WG has introduced a special category called "under-implemented features" to mark those features in the final publication.

Cc @dauwhe @mattgarrish @shiestyle @wareid