A quick summary of the W3C Workshop on Publishing held last week follows.
Also, with respect to a question posed earlier, although the Browser being
the ultimate renderer was a prevalent notion at the workshop (see
http://www.w3.org/2012/12/global-publisher/slides/Day1/P1-Adam-Hyde-browser_
as_renderer_fin.pdf), the idea seemed to be that rendering to a PDF was all
that was needed to get to hardcopy. So printers still have the job of
rendering PDF to something that can drive a print head.
"The New Publishing - A W3C Workshop on the Open Web Platform" was held
September 16-17, 2013 in Paris. This was an activity primarily of the W3C
<http://www.w3.org/dpub/IG/> Digital Publishing Interest Group and was one
of three "publishing via the Web" workshops, including a W3C Workshop on
Electronic Books and the Open Web Platform in New York this past February.
The workshops' purpose was to determine what W3C needed to add to its
specifications to enable/encourage total publication development via the
Open Web platform. The Paris meeting nominally was concerned with publishing
to print.
In line with the focus on print, the PWG presented the position in a panel
presentation (Standards Bodies: Who does what?) that the CSS should include
or reference Print Job Ticket elements, ideally PWG PJT elements, to specify
hardcopy production intent. However, the workshop concerns were with
identifying barriers to greater use of the Open Web Platform, such as the
need for authoring tools and revision control, pagination, and the phase
over of XSLT capabilities to HTML5; there was little excitement in the
additional features offered by the PWG proposal.
Nevertheless, the PWG position is on record and we were encouraged to
present the concept at a higher level, where enhanced features were
considered, and to monitor and comment on W3C specifications and activity in
this area.
For those interested and who are employed by a company that is a W3C member,
I suggest subscribing to the W3C <http://www.w3.org/dpub/IG/> Digital
Publishing Interest Group ( http://www.w3.org/dpub/IG/).
Thanks,
Bill Wagner