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

I think Deborah’s definitions are very clear.

The “snapshot” example is also a portable document. It just happens to be a specific version of the content. I don’t think it changes anything.

Since we have the terms online/cached/offline as separate entries in our glossary, I recommend:

1.       Defining them

2.       Discussing them in a separate thread

Tzviya Siegman
Digital Book Standards & Capabilities Lead
Wiley
201-748-6884
tsiegman@wiley.com<mailto:tsiegman@wiley.com>

From: Deborah Kaplan [mailto:dkaplan@safaribooksonline.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 10, 2015 3:33 PM
To: Leonard Rosenthol
Cc: Bill McCoy; Bill McCoy; Ivan Herman; W3C Digital Publishing IG; Liam Quin; Ralph Swick; Olaf Drümmer
Subject: Re: [Glossary] Definition of a portable document (and other things...)

Leonard:
Bill:

> if what you can take with you (inc. cache and use later) is only a snapshot of one particular state of that content
>then the content itself cannot thereby be considered portable
>
And here is where we disagree,  Bill.   The ability to capture/snapshot one particular state is what people do with PDF today (and have been doing for 20+ years).

And that snapshot is a portable document. But just the snapshot; not the larger pool.
My PDF bank statement is a portable document, but my data in my bank's database is not -- though if they gave me a mysqldump file of the data, it would be portable.
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)

Customers can get a document they can carry with them that can be updated, and that might be "portable" by some definitions (eg. you can put it on a USB stick in your pocket). But it's not portable by the defintion we are using here. We are specifically defining "portable" to mean "all of the essential material is accessible offline". This is a hugely necessary concept in publishing; I'd give examples from our business, but I think we all have reams of examples of this in our pocket.
Much as "document" has myriad meanings all over tech and indeed all over the W3C, this is a case where "portable" needs to have different meanings.
'Portable" to a user might mean "I can stick it in a USB stick in my pocket." To the PDF team it might mean "shows the same document on a smart phone as on a web tv as on a TRS-80 model III." (Forgive me if I'm wrong; that's my understanding of the "portable" in PDF, but you're the expert!) And to Dpub, I believe the meaning we're looking for is "if you give it to astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti and she puts it on her e-reader, she can enjoy a good novel while aboard the Soyuz spacecraft taking her to the ISS."
Deborah