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

Of course it can do things offline, Ivan!   It has a cache of the last set of data that it was able to retrieve, so it is fully functional offline and therefore meets your criteria as such.

But here again we get into the states of a Portable Document.   So it appears that the state is relevant to the definition.

Leonard

From: Ivan Herman
Date: Thursday, September 10, 2015 at 2:03 PM
To: Leonard Rosenthol
Cc: Bill McCoy, W3C Digital Publishing IG, Deborah Kaplan, Liam Quin, Ralph Swick, Olaf Drümmer
Subject: Re: [Glossary] Definition of a portable document (and other things...)

Leonard,

We agree that WDe is not portable. Your dashboard example is indeed borderline, but I *think* it can not be really qualified as portable, because it cannot do anything offline... On the other hand, if the dashboard is part of a larger Web document that teaches information visualization where the dashboard is an example then it is Portable. The borderline is fuzzy. But I think that, as far as I am concerned, a Portable Web Document is defined by a MUST in the definition below.

I think the question is what the subject of discourse is for digital publishing (and EPUB+Web). It is perfectly ok to have Web documents that are not portable but that, may be, can be transformed into a portable Web document. But I believe that it may be perfectly all right to decide that we concentrate on Portable Web Documents in such a strict sense.

Ivan

---
Ivan Herman
Tel:+31 641044153
http://www.ivan-herman.net


(Written on mobile, sorry for brevity and misspellings...)



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.


And on the jQuery example – I agree completely that the version that ONLY uses the remote/external is NOT portable.

Leonard

From: Ivan Herman
Date: Thursday, September 10, 2015 at 10:48 AM
To: Leonard Rosenthol
Cc: Bill McCoy, W3C Digital Publishing IG, Deborah Kaplan, Liam Quin, Ralph Swick, Olaf Drümmer
Subject: Re: [Glossary] Definition of a portable document (and other things...)


On 10 Sep 2015, at 16:24 , Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com<mailto:lrosenth@adobe.com>> wrote:

I think we are almost there…

However, I would prefer to the MUST in the second bullet as a SHOULD (strong recommendation, not requirement).  I know this is the one point on which Bill and I disagree, but we have some actual use cases where this comes up.  Also, in my mind, this is the “cached” state for the PWD – where it would normally get something online but when not connected it could/would use something local (but not part of the document).

Which are those use cases?

To be very specific in an example. Say we have a Web Document which includes scripting, and this scripting relies on jQuery. And this scripting is essential because, e.g., it implements the user interaction for an interactive textbook.

There are two ways to do that: either the author relies on some of the standard places to access the jQuery library (say, from the google developers' site) or a copy of the jQuery library is installed alongside the core files, ie, as part of the constituent set of a Web Document. Let us call then WDe and WDl

I would not call the WDe 'Portable', because the book dies if is off line, whereas WDl works just fine off line, so it *is* a Portable Web Document. This is the situation I would like grasp with the MUST.

The caching is an interesting situation indeed. If the cache works well then, WDe would be cached *after at least one run*, including the jQuery library, and then things could work. Ie, it is somewhere in between.

Does it mean that we are just shifting to the next set of terminology, in fact? We had (based on the wiki page on packaging) three 'states', namely the online, cashed, and portable; are we saying that the Portable Web Document is, in fact, a *state* of a Web Document, rather than some sort of a category?

Just musing…

Ivan




Leonard

From: Ivan Herman
Date: Thursday, September 10, 2015 at 7:24 AM
To: Bill McCoy
Cc: W3C Digital Publishing IG, Deborah Kaplan, Liam Quin, Leonard Rosenthol, Ralph Swick, Olaf Drümmer
Subject: Re: [Glossary] Definition of a portable document (and other things...)

Bill,

just picking up where we were yesterday, to settle the last few meters:-)

We seem to be in agreement in the definition of Web Resources, and Web Documents[1]; let us not repeat them here. What we want is a refinement of the portable part. At present, we have:

• A Portable Web Document: a Web Document which contains, within its constituent set, the information necessary to provide delivery of essential content and functionality, or a graceful degradation thereof, without the presence of any other Web Resources.

Following the idea I had yesterday evening, and also following Deborah's approach on adding some 'explanation' to the terms, what about adding the following two items:

[[[
• It must be possible to present the essential content of a Portable Web Document even if it is offline (though possibly with a lower quality, e.g., using suboptimal, but local fonts, or images instead of a remote video).

• Active processes (e.g., scripts) of a Portable Web Document, when responsible for an essential functionality, must not depend on Web Resources external to the Portable Web Document.
]]]

I was wondering about adding to the second post: "apart from the standards defined for Portable Web Documents, i.e., programming environments and standard API-s available in User Agents", but that might become to much details. This is not mathematics, after all:-)

Any more such "qualifying" notes? Are those fine?

I think that if we find a consensus on this part, we are done with the first round of glossary definitions… But there are more!

Ivan

[1] https://www.w3.org/dpub/IG/wiki/Glossary


----
Ivan Herman, W3C
Digital Publishing Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/

mobile: +31-641044153
ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704







----
Ivan Herman, W3C
Digital Publishing Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/

mobile: +31-641044153
ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704