Fwd: Musings on PWP Offline/Online Modes

The conversation today got me thinking - and maybe it's the new year
crazies, but I got to thinking of the true value of having something of a
PWP "engine" that would provide unique value.  Below are some use cases and
what I feel is an interesting way to handle those cases:

*The "vanilla" fully-offline package*
This is probably closest to what epub is today.  All the files for the PWP
are located in the same base, and besides the occasional <a href=""> link
that points to an external resource, all items are contained within a
package.  With little effort, the package can exist on a server and as long
as there is a reading system that can handle the manifest, the content can
be read in a linear or whatever method we end up with.

I think we're all in agreement here - ignoring word choice like manifest,
etc.


*The web-page-in-a-box*
Fonts live on other servers, images live on other servers, CSS Frameworks
live on a CDN, It's a beautiful (messy) web.  How does this become
offline?  This would require heavy lifting on the part of the browser or
the server (whatever generates the document) but imagine if the packager
could take these resources offline.

*Example*: I'm reading a wikipedia article, and I want to download it as a
PWP.  Wikipedia could specify a list of resources (heck, even a
hyper-minified version of their CSS) as well as all the images related to
that Wikipedia article.  All of those get packaged into a PWP that I can
download and read whenever.  YES IT WILL BE A SNAPSHOT of the page at that
time, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing...  It could even have update
instructions (or an update URL).

External resources get added to the root path in some way like:
/http/somedomaincom/path/to/external/file.css

This could have many benefits.  Imagine that there are a bunch of scholarly
publications that all reference a single image/diagram.  The web-based PWP
version can reference a single online canonical URL, whereas the offline
PWP can have it's own local instance (meaning less duplication, and the
ability to update all the online PWPs at once if there is an update to that
image.  This is OPTIONAL, so if someone wanted to do a snapshot, they just
reference a local image.

For publishers - they could have a common CSS framework that they could
keep up-to-date, so that if they found a bug, or decided that they wanted
body color to be bright orange, they could update it once, and all new
offline PWPs that are generated get that.

Since this is 100% optional, those who wanted full control can simply opt
to create their content fully within a single root.  The ability to be able
to specify certain online resources to be "critical" to an offline package
could create production benefits (and yes, I realize it could also create
some headaches).



-- 
- Nick Ruffilo
@NickRuffilo
http://Aerbook.com
http://twitch.tv/TheWizardLlewyn
http://ZenOfTechnology.com <http://zenoftechnology.com/>