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

I probably shouldn't say this but as a dyed-in-the-wool English major I can't help myself.

George Eliot wrote Middlemarch.

I may not be the most expert code jockey on this IG, but I know my literature. ;-)

--Bill K

-----Original Message-----
From: Liam R. E. Quin [mailto:liam@w3.org] 
Sent: Monday, June 22, 2015 10:59 PM
To: Brady Duga
Cc: Liza Daly; Dave Cramer; W3C Digital Publishing IG
Subject: Re: Manifest(o)s, offline reading, and EPUB+WEB

On Mon, 2015-06-22 at 23:00 +0000, Brady Duga wrote:
> I expect it will be unlikely I can get permission to create 5 million 
> google.com subdomains. I don't think this scales very well.

You actually only need to create one subdomain, e.g.
    read.google.com
Then, allow *.read.google.com to resolve to read.google.com.

Then people would use e.g. middlemarch.thomas-hardy.read.google.com
and that would match *.read.google.com, go to the right place, and could be passed to a database seach (say).

I'm not trying to promote this - AppCache isn't really designed for this use case and might or might not work well out of the box - but I'm also not trying to shoot it down.

>  Idon't know much about appcache - can the resources be on different 
> domains than the manifest? Not all content for a single book is 
> necessarily served from the same domain.

The AppCache spec wants everything on the same domain. You can point outside but other things won't be pre-fetched for offline use, as I understand it.

Liam

> 
> On Mon, Jun 22, 2015 at 3:10 PM Liam R. E. Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:
> 
> > 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 Tuesday, 23 June 2015 14:49:05 UTC