RE: On Spreadsheets, Birthday Cards, and the Nature of Publications

The distinction I’d make is that while we can publish many types of documents, just because they’re published doesn’t make them publications in the sense we are using the term for WP. While I suppose nothing should prevent somebody from publishing a single document as a WP, the act of publishing doesn’t make it a WP; conforming to our yet-to-be-defined WP spec is what makes it a WP. And I agree with Dave, just packaging alone is not sufficient. I get documents, and bunches of documents, all the time as .zip packages; those are not “publications” in the WP sense.

Bill Kasdorf

VP and Principal Consultant | Apex CoVantage

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From: Dave Cramer [mailto:dauwhe@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, August 14, 2017 9:27 AM
To: W3C Publishing Working Group
Subject: On Spreadsheets, Birthday Cards, and the Nature of Publications

As we've discussed various issues on GitHub, our esteemed colleague from Adobe has provided examples of potential web publications which seem, to my dinosaur dead-tree publisher eyes, to be rather far removed from what I think of as publications.

Leonard has often spoken of "ad-hoc publications," such as memos, reports, letters—the output of tools that are categorized with words like "office" and "document" and "productivity". And of course we can can make such documents using HTML/CSS/JS, and we should, ’cause HTML is cool and CSS is awe-
some.

But how would a birthday card or a spreadsheet benefit from being a web publication? They are unlikely to consist of more than one primary resource, and the existing web platform seems entirely capable of providing a good user experience, except for one thing. Such "ad-hoc publications" would benefit from being packaged and portable.

But do we need to design web publications around these types of documents, when packaging is likely the only feature they require? Can we usefully separate the concept of packaging from other aspects of web publications?

Dave