The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published the final report of the 'Workshop on the Publishing and the Open Web Platform' that was held September 16-17, 2013, in Paris.
The W3C Workshop in Paris was the third in a series of industry consultation events held by W3C. The goal of this Workshop was first to identify difficulties faced by existing professional publishing organisations in using tools based on the Open Web platform, including the production of printed books, and second to find ways to work on eliminating or ameliorating those difficulties.
About fifty statements of interest and position papers were received for the two-day event, and approximately sixty people attended the Workshop. Part of the workshop were panels around a selected subset of the submissions, part was organized as open discussions.
Many of the issues raised during the discussions will provide additional input to the work started by the W3C Digital Publishing Interest Group, collecting specific technical requirements of the publishing industry for the technologies of the Open Web Platform. Furthermore, it was felt that an additional activity on education and outreach may be necessary; indeed, one of the challenges of the Publishing Industry overall is to improve technical expertise in-house, also covering the new possibilities offered by the Open Web Platform (e.g., advanced CSS control for complex typography, or interactivity of electronic books provided by scripting), as well as the missing contacts the industry may have with Web Designers and Web Application Developers.
It was also felt that W3C should continue to establish liaisons with various industry organisations in the area, and also to reach out to librarians and archivists to collaborate on, for example, the metadata issues of the publishing industry.
