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

I would agree that your example from amazon is one that you probably wouldn’t want portable…

But consider what you see when you log into a place like eTrade, with all the charts and graphs about your stock portfolio.
Or consider the reports from Adobe or Google Analytics.

Those are all examples of things that users currently take away with them but they are static snapshots.   What if they could be interactive versions (using the same web technologies) of that snapshot  BUT could also be updated with the latest data simply by reconnecting?

We’ve talked to MANY corporate users who want something like this…

Now you could argue semantics and terminology all you want – but at the end of the day, there is a customer demand for a portable document that can be updated…(and this isn’t new, we’ve been hearing this request around PDF for close to 20 years now)

Leonard

From: Bill McCoy
Date: Thursday, September 10, 2015 at 2:07 PM
To: Olaf Drümmer
Cc: Leonard Rosenthol, Ivan Herman, W3C Digital Publishing IG, Deborah Kaplan, Liam Quin, Ralph Swick
Subject: Re: [Glossary] Definition of a portable document (and other things...)

Yes, and let me piggyback on this to try to make my point (to Ivan) more clear.

I think that the ability to reliably capture a snapshot and use it offline is a righteous feature for a Web Document to offer. And, the results of that snapshot might be itself a (new instance of a) "Portable [Web] Document".

But to me that does not make the original Web Document itself a "Portable Web Document" because what is captured with the snapshot is not a true representation of the original document.

Leonard's dashboard example is a perfect illustration. Take a dashboard like http://status.aws.amazon.com/ .  I can't imagine calling that a "Portable Web Document".

I think we are here confusing offline features of Web Documents with what is a Portable [Web] Document. I don't believe they are at all the same thing. And I am still convinced we can come up with a definition for the latter that is neither anthropocentric nor fundamentally subjective.

--Bill



On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 10:58 AM, Olaf Drümmer <olaf@druemmer.com<mailto:olaf@druemmer.com>> wrote:
But we may want to keep in mind that being able to capture a snapshot (kind of a 'frozen state') could be a valid feature, as much as being able to update when (after having been offline) being online again. Not sure whether a 'deep freeze' switch would be a metadata item in the portable document (== do not update me), or whether the document would have to be written into a portable document such that it simply doesn't update it itself anymore.

Olaf


On 10 Sep 2015, at 18:16, Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@ADOBE.COM<mailto:lrosenth@ADOBE.COM>> wrote:

One of the best examples/use cases that we have in this area is a “Dashboard”, as you might get to visualize any sort of data.

You would like this dashboard to be portable – so that it can be used both online and offline.  But in the online case, the document should be able to get the latest set of data and then store that away for offline use (aka caching, but explicit instead of implicit).

So yes – I think we are now getting into the “state” of the document.  It is portable but can be in different states.





--

Bill McCoy
Executive Director
International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF)
email: bmccoy@idpf.org<mailto:bmccoy@idpf.org>
mobile: +1 206 353 0233