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

Since this thread began as a conversation about the need to define the term
"Portable Web Document" for precision when referring to it in our
communication, and since it's the end of the day Friday at the beginning of
a long weekend on the east coast of the US, where I live, I will decline to
pick up the bottle of kerosene you just handed me by making this
specifically about real world formats. ;) If we are ever having a
conversation over which formats meet digital publishing's functional
requirements, I will happily get into the weeds of that conversation, but
that is not necessary for this conversation.

How about this, though. Let's posit two OWP-compliant formats:

* MonkeyTyping
* InkSplatter 2.0
,
Then you hand me two documents in each standard: an encoded graphic novel
with no alternative text, and a beautifully marked up, completely
accessible picturebook.

You point out that my argument says the former two are not portable
documents, even though both MonkeyTyping and Inksplatter 2.0 are
OWP-compliant. I would have two answers to that:

1. Nothing in the OWP requires portability as we are defining it here, or
we'd have no need to be defining all this temrinology around offline use
and packaging.

2. Why, yes, I *did* just come up with a new definition of portability that
makes accessibility of the content necessary? I'm quite smug about it,
thank you! *takes a bow*

More seriously, I'm sure that there are plenty of problems with that second
point, but it's absolutely worth considering.

Deborah

On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 4:10 PM, Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com>
wrote:

> 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
> <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
>