Re: Manifest(o)s, offline reading, and EPUB+WEB

On Mon, 2015-06-22 at 15:14 -0400, Liza Daly wrote:
> Bookish (now the Overdrive web app) does still use app cache, and 
> gets around this problem by creating subdomains _for every title_:
> 
> https://odcom-366d624d6b53b08a9d0a2c90b1dcea88.read.overdrive.com/ 
> https://odcom-c2b601cb17f569fd4711e467edd142c1.read.overdrive.com/
> 
> I imagine this would be an unpopular general purpose solution.

Why would it be unpopular? It was certainly my first thought on how to 
get round the limitations of AppCache. Subdomains are cheap and can 
easily be turned into a low-overhead search on a Web server.

It does mean you have to have cooperation from your web server people, 
though, if only to install the search engine.

Invalidating the entire cache for a book might be a pain, though, if 
the book is, say, a gigabyte in total size.

This also maybe provides a mechanism to link between books.

Liam

> 
> Liza
> 
> 
> On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 2:54 PM, Dave Cramer <dauwhe@gmail.com> 
> wrote:
> 
> > We've recently spent a lot of time discussing how to make a book 
> > [1] readable both offline and online. As usual, this is an issue 
> > that has come
> > up in the larger web world. and there is a solution already 
> > supported by every major browser. I'm speaking of AppCache [2], of 
> > course.
> > 
> > At first glance, AppCache seems well-suited for books. An 
> > application manifest file (text-only) lists the resources used by 
> > the book, including
> > CSS, images, scripts, fonts, etc.:
> > 
> > CACHE MANIFEST
> > #v3 2015-06-05
> > css/mobydick.css
> > metadata.json
> > manifest.json
> > title-page.html
> > copyright.html
> > introduction.html
> > epigraph.html
> > c001.html
> > c002.html
> > 
> > 
> > When you first visit a page, the files listed in the manifest are 
> > downloaded. The next time you visit the page, you'll get the 
> > cached version. This is a problem for the regular web, but could 
> > be an advantage
> > for us. If you change the manifest file on the server, you will 
> > trigger an
> > update of the cache.
> > 
> > So my question is, why does everyone hate [3,sorry about the 
> > language] this? The cache manifest itself would be helpful for 
> > EPUB+WEB, as it gives
> > us the list of files everyone seems to want, but far simpler than 
> > EPUB's <manifest> element.
> > 
> > * * *
> > 
> > To be fair, the word "manifest" is probably less overloaded than 
> > the word
> > "template." Nevertheless, the "Manifest for a web application" 
> > specification [4] appears to be unrelated to the application 
> > manifest used
> > by AppCache. Manifests for web applications are JSON files that 
> > provide metadata for a web app. They could provide a location and 
> > syntax for book
> > metadata, and identify a starting point for the book:
> > 
> > {
> >   "name": "Moby-Dick",
> >   "short_name": "Moby-Dick",
> >   "icons": [{
> >         "src": "icons/moby-dick-icon.webp",
> >         "sizes": "64x64",
> >         "type": "image/webp"
> >       }],
> >   "start_url": "title-page.html",
> >   "display": "minimal-ui",
> > }
> > 
> > Together, these two manifests seem to meet several of EPUB+WEB's 
> > requirements. I'm interested in further exploring these ideas to 
> > see if they can be adopted or modified to meet our needs.
> > 
> > Dave
> > 
> > 
> > [1] Feel free to think "publication" every time I write "book" :) 
> > [2] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/browsers.html#offline 
> > [3]  http://alistapart.com/article/application-cache-is-a-douchebag
> > [4] https://w3c.github.io/manifest/
> >

Received on Monday, 22 June 2015 22:10:00 UTC