Re: A followup/writeup on our Monday discussions (was Re: Continuing discussion on Polyfills)

> On 7 Feb 2018, at 15:20, Hadrien Gardeur <hadrien.gardeur@feedbooks.com <mailto:hadrien.gardeur@feedbooks.com>> wrote:
> 
> 2. I’m concerned that the "publication mode" terminology conflates the concepts of publication-specific affordances and publication-specific UI.
>   - sometimes an affordance is directly related to UI (e.g. pagination) , sometimes not (e.g. offlinability).
> 
> I disagree, I think that "publication mode" MUST be 100% handled by the user agent, and never publication specific. A publication may provide a Web App as a fallback though.
> 
> If each publication starts implementing various features of the publication mode on their own as polyfills, we're going to have a very very hard time dealing with that in Web and native apps.

I used "publication-specific" to mean "Web Pub"-specific (as opposed to other Web content), not in the sense of per-publication :-)

>  
> 
>   - "mode" here conflicts with WAM’s "display mode" concept, which is mostly only about UI chrome. 
> 
> ... but this is very consistent with existing reader modes in browsers.

Good point.

>  
>   - the idea of "switching" to a "separate publication mode" makes sense for a UI, but some affordances can be provided transparently in a vanilla browser context (offlinability, next/previous links added with a speculative polyfill, etc). This concept of "separate publication mode" also kinda conflicts with progressive enhancement.
> 
> I really dislike polyfills in resources from the default reading order, and strongly believe that all publications should be readable entirely without any polyfill or UA specific support.

I agree that they should be readable.
But polyfills can be a viable way to provide some affordances IMO.

> 
> Reader mode in browsers is also a switch btw.

My point was that "publication mode" in the wiki page conflates the concept of a specific UI+UX mode (à la reader mode) with the concept of an abstract set of affordances that we envision for Web Pubs. Some of these affordances can be provided without having to "switch" to a different UI mode.

Romain.