Bringing together the web and digital publishing communities

A year and a half ago IDPF and the W3C and, more generally, the digital publishing and the web communities, started on a cooperation path to bring the underlying technologies closer. Although the EPUB 3 specification was a major step in this direction, the parties recognized that there were still opportunities for improvement. Web technologies should respond to the requirements and needs of the publishing community and, at the same time, the publishing community can make better use of the possibilities offered by the Web. This cooperation led to the creation of a number of task forces, all within the framework of the W3C Digital Publishing Interest Group (DPUB). DPUB touches on diverse areas, including layout and typography, pagination, structural semantics, metadata, and accessibility. DPUB has been working in tandem with other new groups (e.g., web annotation) to produce new specifications, and discussing a long-term vision on how to bring these technologies closer, making digital publishing a first-class entity on the Web. This presentation gives a short overview of the achievements of the task forces, as well as the longer-term vision on where this cooperation may lead us. The talk, as well as the discussion that follows, will be held by the leader of the Digital Publishing Activity at the W3C (Ivan Herman, W3C).