Minutes – Z39.86 Advisory Committee Conference Call

Attendees

Advisory Committee:

• George Kerscher, Advisory Committee Chair – DAISY Consortium and Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic
• Neil Bernstein – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
• Marisa DeMeglio – DAISY Consortium
• Reuben Firmin – Benetech
• Markus Gylling – DAISY Consortium and Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille (TPB)
• Dominic Labbé – HumanWare
• Kenny Johar – Vision Australia
• James Pritchett – Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic
• Lloyd Rasmussen – National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
• Linus Ericson – Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille (TPB)

• John Brugge – Benetech
• Kathy Kahl – DAISY Consortium

Apologies:

• Ole Holst Andersen – The Danish National Library for the Blind
• Boris Goldowsky – CAST
• Diana Hiorth Persson/Mats Johnson – Dolphin
• Rob Longstaff – Royal National Institute of Blind People
• Hiromitsu Fujimori – Shinano Kenshi Co., Ltd.

Agenda

The call agenda was distributed to the Advisory Committee list on July 1. There were no additions to the agenda.

Confirmation of Date and Time for Next Call

The next call is scheduled for July 16. Calls will continue every 2 weeks through the summer up until the FTF Meeting: August 6, August 20, and September 3.

Next Face to Face Meeting

The FTF meeting is set for September 16-18. Per Karen, the following two hotels were recommended by Google:

• Hotel Avante:  Mountain View, CA. This hotel is closest to Google, has a Google rate of $169 and has a shuttle to Google.  Breakfast included.
• Wild Palms Hotel: Sunnyvale, CA.   This hotel is a little farther away, no shuttle but the rate is $129. Breakfast also included.

Ask for the Google rate when you make your reservation. We have not held a block of rooms so rates will be dependent on a room being available. Both have free wireless with breakfast included. Reservations for both: +1.800.538.1600. www.jdvhotels.com/. George would favor the one with the shuttle.

Issues Tracking

Issue #221: DTB Title Validation

Resolution from Ole: The content model of level and level1-6 is kept as is, disallowing level/level1-6 with headings only. The Pipeline scripts for migrating DTBook v1.1.0 has been changed to handle level/level1-6 with only headings by appending an empty p element, thus indirectly addressing the issue.

This was accepted, without comments or changes.

Issue #222: Are arabic numerals allowed in "front" pagenums?

Language from James:

Currently, the pagenum element includes an attribute @page that indicates the type of page.  This attribute can have one of three values:  "front", "normal", and "special".  Comments in the DTD indicate that these values are tied to the character content of the element itself:  "front" [is] for roman-numeral pages at the start of a book, "normal" [is] for pages identified by arabic numerals, [and] "special"' [is] for all other kinds of pages."  The Structure Guidelines, however, indicates that "front" pages are those that occur in the frontmatter:  "page='front' is used to mark the page numbers used in the front matter of most books (most often roman numerals but sometimes arabic).  Regardless of the type of page numbering used in the book, pages located in the front matter, preceding the body, should be marked up as page='front'."  So the issue here is which of these definitions of "front" is correct:  does "front" indicate the character content of the pagenum (roman numeral), or does it indicate the structural location of the pagenum (in frontmatter).

Most producers and developers understand @page="front" to mean "roman numeral".  In addition, the Structure Guidelines description does not make sense: why should the location of the pagenum determine the value of @page for front matter pages but not for any other kind of page in the book? That a page is part of the front matter is self-evident from the location of the pagenum element within frontmatter.  For these reasons, the DTD comment should be taken as accurate and the Structure Guidelines should be revised to match this.

This issue arises because of flaws in the whole pagenum/@page structure.  If @page is to be used to signal the character content of the pagenum, then the values should perhaps be "roman", "arabic", and "other" -- this would be clearer.  That said, there is also the question of why this attribute should be present at all, since the data it provides is redundant.  Improving the data model for pagination should be a future direction for the specification.

James' resolution was adopted with 2 outcomes: 1) an update to the SG; 2) a future requirement. Marisa is sending a followup email regarding page numbering schema. There is not any input yet regarding page numbering schemes in other countries.

Container Specification

It seems that there are companies that want to make the IDPF container specification an ISO standard. The IDPF is not an approved ISO standards body and has no mechanism for this. Adobe is looking at taking their specification, which is similar to the IDPF and moving this forward. Apparently in OOXML, there already is a container specification for that document type, based on the zip container.

George asked if this is going to be part of the upcoming standard, do we want a smaller group to take a look and come back with recommendations to the larger group? George is involved in the IDPF activity politically but needs help with the technical issues that should be considered. This is expected to move forward fairly quickly with roughly the same time frame as our standard.

DTBook Moving Forward

George announced that we'd like to get a subgroup together to start moving along with this. Kenny stated passionate interest in DTBook being enhanced to serve as the single source file, and Markus summarized that most of the DC is in agreement to do this as soon as possible.

NISO Update

There has been no news and none is expected until after the 4th of July holiday.