Re: [Glossary] Definition of a portable document (and other things...)

OK – let’s take your position then…and use a commonly accepted choice for portable web content EPUB.

Would you say that a Fixed Layout EPUB is a “Portable Web Document” (POW) under your definition?

Would you say that an EPUB consisting of a collection of images, such as a comic book or manga, meets your definition for POW?    What if there are no alternates specified for those images, making it completely inaccessible?

Would you say that an EPUB containing a series of videos, without any captioning, is a POW?


Personally, I would consider ALL of them valid POW’s because they are all using technologies from the Open Web Platform and are bundled together in a portable container.


Now for fun – would you consider a PDF/UA-1 compliant file to be a POW?    I would argue that it would be – perhaps more so than the examples above – because it

  1.  uses technology considered part of the Open Web Platform.  (PDF is supported by all modern browsers natively and is referenced and exampled in the HTML spec)
  2.  It is adaptive and accessible due to it use of proper structure (according to the rules of PDF/UA)

Your thoughts?

Leonard

From: Deborah Kaplan
Date: Friday, September 4, 2015 at 2:45 PM
To: Leonard Rosenthol
Cc: Ivan Herman, W3C Digital Publishing IG, Ralph Swick, Bill Kasdorf, Bill McCoy
Subject: Re: [Glossary] Definition of a portable document (and other things...)

On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 2:00 PM, Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com177<mailto:lrosenth@adobe.com>> wrote:
Deborah – you seem to be mixing the abilities of the file format with the specific implementation choices of an author using that format.

Nope. ;)

Quoting the beginning of the thread: Ivan began with "A **Portable Web Document** is a uniquely identifiable set of resources that together provide a graceful degradation when presented to the user even if an active server infrastructure is not available. All components of a portable document should themselves be portable.

The question is, can a document be a Portable Web Document if it is not adaptable? The answer is no.

It may be in a portable format, but it is not a portable document.

We do not need to define portability for formats, here. That is the responsibility of the keepers of the various format standards. We need to define what are the functional requirrements of a thing we call a "portable web document."

The format is portable, because it allows the content to be used in all of those environments in a common manner.   The fact that a given author of content for that format chose to do something strange (be it colors or offscreen or whatever) has NOTHING to do with the formats ability to be portable.

That is true. And I am not making any assertions about the standards of the format.

A "portable web document" is adaptable. This means it must be written in a format which allows adaptable encoding.

Deborah