Re: [pwp] Progressive enhancement of digital books

> On 3 Dec 2015, at 11:01, Florian Rivoal <florian@rivoal.net> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 03 Dec 2015, at 18:01, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> On 2 Dec 2015, at 17:25, Cramer, Dave <Dave.Cramer@hbgusa.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Dec 2, 2015, at 4:27 AM, AUDRAIN LUC <LAUDRAIN@hachette-livre.fr> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> For the sake of the demo, I don¹t see why in slide 5, you don¹t give
>>>> href="nav.html" in the link in c0001.html?
>>>> Obviously as the link points to a non existant file, it doesn¹t work in
>>>> ordinary browser as shown in slide 5.
>>>> but with a link pointing to nav.html, it should work or is index.html a
>>>> reserved name?
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> I did a poor job of explaining. If you have the URL of the folder, but don't know what's inside the folder, a browser won't generally display any of the content unless it finds an index.html file (or something like an .htaccess file, if the server supports it). But if we have nav.html and rename it to index.html, then any browser will open index.html when you go to the folder URL. It's just a convention that makes it easy to find this critical document.
>> 
>> 
>> For my understanding: what this means that the 'index.html' (or 'nav.html') would not only be the TOC but something much more complex, essentially the cover page of the publication, right?
>> 
>> What this touches upon is my question the other day, which is still something to discuss: if the URL 'U' identifies the PWP, what does a HTTP GET return? My approach, up to now, was that the return would be the manifest. In your case, would it be the index.html that links to the manifest?
> 
> This is where I show how naïve I am...
> 
> Why cannot index.html be the manifest (while being the cover page etc at the same time)? We'd need additional conventions beyond the normal semantics of HTML, what's wrong with that?

It could. Except that the manifest file may become fairly large, and editing it as part of an HTML file (at least for human editor) may become cumbersome.

If we go down that road, I would still prefer to settle on the index file with a link to the manifest (an option that Dave had on his slides), just for reasons of maintenance. Also, manifests are often handled by dedicated javascript routines; a manifest in JSON is quicker and easier to digest than, say, if all information is encoded into RDFa as part of the index file.

(Another alternative, and this should not be excluded, is to embed a manifest in JSON as a <script> tag in the HTML file. For shorter manifests this may be fine.)

Ivan


> 
> As far as I understand, that's the approach taken by scholarly HTML, and the one that epub0 was advocating.
> 
> - Florian


----
Ivan Herman, W3C
Digital Publishing Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
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ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704