Minutes – Z39.86 Advisory Committee Conference Call

Attendees

Advisory Committee:

• George Kerscher, Advisory Committee Chair – DAISY Consortium and Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic
• Ole Holst Andersen – The Danish National Library for the Blind
• Neil Bernstein – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
• Thomas Kjellberg Christensen – The Danish National Library for the Blind
• Marisa DeMeglio – DAISY for All Project
• Linus Ericson – Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille
• Kenny Johar – Vision Australia
• James Pritchett – Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic
• Lloyd Rasmussen – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped

Participating Experts:

• Kathy Kahl, Scribe – DAISY Consortium
• Dominic Labbé – HumanWare
• Lynn Leith – DAISY Consortium

Apologies:

• Boris Goldowsky – CAST
• Markus Gylling – DAISY Consortium and Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille
• Rob Longstaff – Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB)
• Diana Hiorth Persson – Dolphin

Agenda

The agenda for the call was distributed to the Advisory Committee list on December 18. Two items were added to the agenda: 1) time for the next call; 2) formal composition of the committee.

Confirmation of Date and Time for Next Call

The next conference call is 2008 January 9, 0900 Eastern USA. Calls following this are scheduled for January 23, Feb 6, Feb 20, Mar 5, Mar 19, and April 2. Details for the FTF during the week of April 14 are not quite firmed up.

Formal Composition of This Committee

Our Terms of Reference require reconfirmation of each person's participation in the committee at the beginning of each year, so the first action at the January 9 meeting will be to affirm membership on the committee. George asked and there were no objections to people "lurking" on the list for this group.

Issues Review

There are two new submitted issues:

1. #214: Math Section needed in the Structure Guidelines which is assigned to the MathML group which has agreed to author it.
2. #215: An XSLT is required to transform MathML constructs for those players that cannot use it but the Mime type for an XSLT XML application is not allowed in the package and is flagged by Zedval. There is an enumerated list in Section 3.3 but was not meant to be all-inclusive. It only names the files that were mentioned in the Specification. The question is whether there should be an erratum to add 'xslt' or to state in general that other file types should be allowed. We do want the Validator to check for valid file-types and not just allow anything. James will work up an errata fix to a) clarify with a short statement that it is not all-inclusive list; b) add the mime-type and .xsl file type.

Kathy has fixed some of the validation issues in the Errata document but it is yet not completely updated with wording for all of the errata issues.

DTD issues and assignments:

1. #148 is resolved and James has made the changes to the new DTD.
2. #199 Page numbers in tables, 2 solutions were proposed.
   Discussion: should we allow a table without a tr (table row element), since we do allow a list without list items, and an imggroup without images? Allowing an empty list is silly but an imggroup without images is OK since some productions may not produce images but need an imggroup to wrap captions, etc. Even so it would be strange to have an imggroup with only a pagenum in it. Are we creating new issues here or do we want to leave it as is?
   George would like to track all these issues. Fixing the list construct is rather complicated. This could be submitted as a Requirement and tracked for future work, or submitted as an issue that is not being resolved in this version of the DTD since it does seem like more of an error than an actual requirement.
   Regarding tables, the current solution incorporated in the new DTD requires at least one tr and disallows pagenum within thead or tfoot. Regarding imggroup, the solution should cover how pagenum would work with the other allowed elements. Thomas expressed concern that by adding these limitations, the DTD is getting very difficult for humans to read. George commented that we are "getting into schema land" and that we don’t want to go there in terms of making the DTD overly complicated by trying to handle these constructs. Lloyd reminded all, that "we used to say there are a lot of things in the spec that are legal but stupid." Discussion went back to the table solution, asking why complicate the table definition, that it can be ok to have an empty table. The point is human-readability of the DTD. The simpler model that Ole sent was decided on and James will incorporate it into the new DTD.

James will send out a revised version of the new DTD dated 12/19. This will not be put on the Web site until after testing by Boris and Kathy. It will also be turned over to Microsoft (Sonata) for their testing. It will be taken to the ATIA conference by James and George. The Errata page will be posted after the DTD is tested. It should reference the latest version by name as 'dtbook-2005-3.dtd'.

Structure Guidelines

Element reviews by Zed Committee members were still coming in as of late yesterday. Brandon Nelson is collecting all comments and making revisions. Any issues that are quite extensive that Brandon cannot resolve may come back to this group.

There are some overall issues to be addressed:

1. References to Part 1 and 2 are confusing.
2. Specific references to a DTD as the latest version should be changed to reference the latest version generically.
3. Usage of the terms 'tag' vs 'element' should be reviewed for consistency.

After the next version is completed by Brandon with a list of outstanding issues, it will hopefully be available by the end of January and will be dated SG 2008. This document is intended to be the most authoritative of guidelines and has been requested by publishers with this addition of real pages.

Regarding accessibility and screen reader usage, it should be documented that the spacebar works on the 'Expand All' button rather than the Enter key.

NISO Update

Todd Carpenter is the Managing Director of NISO and met with George and Markus in Washington, D.C. on December 11th. NISO plans to announce the Call for Revision of the Z3986 Standard along with the Call for Participation to all NISO members in January. We can expect that any of these people may join as additional members of this group. The IDPF has a spec for eBook 2.0 (".ePub") which points to DTBook and the NCX. The IDPF has another standard for eBooks which is just a subset of HTML. They are seeing the publicity that DAISY is getting, noting that now there are two standards for eBooks, i.e. DAISY and the eBook standard. They would like one standard. We have talked about this in our profiling discussion. The new IDPF Board meets today and is discussing moving their standard into NISO, which would not want two competing standards under their umbrella. George wants to update us all that this is a tricky time, and requested feedback. Thomas felt that more information is needed before being able to list pros and cons. The hope is that DAISY would become the overall technical framework for eBook with our profiling mechanism, the IDPF would be basically a trade organization, resulting in DAISY being the standard for eBook. There will probably be a conference call between DAISY, NISO, and the IDPF. This committee might be the right group to confer with the IDPF Board in terms of technical issues; some issues are also strategic.

Requirements Gathering

Two new requirements have been submitted but were not discussed due to time constraints.