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

Leonard, of course dynamic updating of information when online is a
desirable feature... the banking app on my mobile phone, among others,
already works this way and I suspect you use apps that do likewise. I think
we all agree on pushing for OWP to enable doing more of this without
resorting to native apps.

But to me, content that changes on the fly based on new data is not what I
would call a portable document, since it depends on a server process to
realize the true current state of the content, and that server process
cannot be archived etc.

This group may certainly want to taking on helping to facilitate this
feature in Web Documents but I don't think we should conflate "portable
documents" with "offline-usable Web applications", even if a cached state
of the Web application may be portable.  Maybe we just need additional
terms rather than trying to load everything on to "portable".

--Bill

On Thu, Sep 10, 2015 at 12:15 PM, Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com>
wrote:

> 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> 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> 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
> mobile: +1 206 353 0233
>
>


-- 

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