Re: Can a publication change over time?

ServiceWorkers deal with this situation wrt to caches:

https://w3c.github.io/ServiceWorker/#cache-lifetimes

"...caches are not updated automatically. Updates must be manually
managed.  This implies that authors should version their caches by name and
make  sure to use the caches only from the version of the service worker
that can safely operate on."


That seems to map pretty cleanly to the world of WP's where
offline-ification is a requirement. Consequently, the Web Publication would
become "published" once it lived as close to the reader as possible--in
this case, within a unique local cache/storage.

I'm not sure that I understand your point. There's no magic involved with
Service Workers. They're pretty much a proxy that you can control using
Javascript.

How you handle the network policy ("network then cache" for example) is
entirely up to you, same for how the resources are actually cached (which
cache key, how you sweep and initialize your cache).

How does this map cleanly to the world of WP?

If the publication were prevented (or asked not to) be kept by the
browser/reader, then the publication would "just be a web site" and get
updates the same as every web page--"live" upon request...no additional
decision to be made.


Are you suggesting that to handle offline use cases we'll have to rely
entirely on a Service Worker written by the author?

If that's your suggestion, what's the difference then between a PWA and a
WP aside from a potentially different manifest?

IMO, we should have a declarative approach to our resources (list them in
the manifest) and I don't think that it's reasonable to expect all WPs to
craft their own SW.
Keep also in mind that SWs are still unavailable in Safari (goodbye offline
reading on iOS) and in Webviews on Android (only available in Chrome
itself).



Just thoughts. :)

Benjamin


--

http://bigbluehat.com/

http://linkedin.com/in/benjaminyoung
------------------------------
*From:* Hadrien Gardeur <hadrien.gardeur@feedbooks.com>
*Sent:* Thursday, July 27, 2017 1:53:24 PM
*To:* Baldur Bjarnason
*Cc:* Garth Conboy; Laurent Le Meur; public-publ-wg@w3.org

*Subject:* Re: Can a publication change over time?


> All we can realistically accomplish here is to outline a mechanism where
> publishers can provide metadata of the sort that Hadrien describes. Even
> then that’s only going to be advisory/informative since the publisher still
> has the ability to modify those resources and if the UA is going to reject
> changed resources we’re basically back to using the SRI spec.


Fully agree that this is at best a hint that could be useful to update the
WP when you cache it (offline reading) or package it (PWP). Fairly similar
to "updated" in Atom.