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

> On 11 Sep 2015, at 15:49 , Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com> wrote:
> 
> Ivan – I don’t believe you correct reflected the discussions of yesterday.
> 
> My understanding of the discussion between myself and Bill M was that a “Web Document” can be in different states, but that a “Portable Web Document” can only exist in an offline state.  That’s a significant difference from what you are proposing below.
> 

Well… I let Bill react on this; it may well be that my reaction was tainted by my own opinion. But I believe that it is important to differentiate that Portable Web Documents may be in different states, too. That may become important when we look at the role and way of handling identifiers (absolute and relative URI-s, etc) with regard to the documents.

As for Web Documents: of course they can also be in different states. I did not say they cannot; what I believe is (see below) that we should not try to define everything, only the part that is relevant for Digital Publishing.

> > would think that this is not the subject of discourse for this Interest Group which, after all,
> >"just" wants to set up a framework for Digital Publishing and the Web
> >
> While I recognize that this group was formed to focus on the particular needs of Digital Publishing – if the group is going to take on defining globally applicable terms (such as Web Document and Portable Web Document), then those definitions MUST be general purpose as well!   Either that or we should pick terms that are focused strictly on DigPub.
> 

General purpose: yes. But getting into all the details of how they behave outside the realm of Digital Publishing (whose focus, I believe, should be Portable Web Documents only): I do not think we can and we should.


> >• A Web Resource in a Web Document is Portable if an OWP compliant user agent can render its essential content by relying exclusively on the Web >Resources within the same Web Document.
> >• A Portable Web Document is a Web Document whose all constituent Web Resources are Portable.
> >
> On the surface, these definitions sounds reasonable.  Unfortunately, as soon as you start diving into them, they fall down fairly quickly.   Let me give a simple and easy case (using EPUB as an example of a Portable Web Document):
> - An EPUB that uses CSS such as { font-family: Helvetica } will not qualify since the OWP UA is using a resource not in the document.

I do not believe that is a problem. The user agent is able to render the essential content of the relevant HTML using a fallback font that all user agents have. That being said, if the EPUB is such that a particular font usage is essential for the content then the font file should be in the EPUB file, otherwise it is not really portable.

I recognize that the 'essential content' is a little bit fuzzy, but I do not think we can avoid this.

> 
> > EPUB+WEB document
> >
> Can we PLEASE rename that document?   That was how I started this conversation, in that it has already picked a specific technology to solve a problem.  Instead, that should be the “Portable Web Document” document…
> 

I would prefer not to touch to that document now. But, as I said, that is why this conversation is important.

Cheers

Ivan


> 
> Leonard
> 
> From: Ivan Herman
> Date: Friday, September 11, 2015 at 8:40 AM
> To: W3C Digital Publishing IG
> Cc: Bill McCoy, Olaf Drümmer, Deborah Kaplan, Liam Quin, Ralph Swick, Leonard Rosenthol, Tzviya - Hoboken Siegman
> Subject: Re: [Glossary] Definition of a portable document (and other things...)
> 
> Good morning/afternoon
> 
> here is your friendly daily summary:-) to start the next round. Maybe the last? (That would be a good way to close the week-end:-)
> 
> As far as I am concerned, the most important outcome of the last round is the recognition that we may mix the definition of the various documents and their states. I fully agree with Tzviya that we should separate the details of that discussion for a separate thread; just to build the bridge to that thread I believe that:
> 
> - We (will:-) have the notion of a Portable Web Document
> - A Portable Web Document may be in an online, cached, or offline state
> 
> It is of course true that a (not necessarily portable) Web Documents may also be in a cashed state, for example. Also, as was discussed on the thread, a general Web Document may be transformed into a Portable Web Document (e.g., dumping its snapshot into a PDF file), but I would think that this is not the subject of discourse for this Interest Group which, after all, "just" wants to set up a framework for Digital Publishing and the Web, ie, EPUB+WEB. We should limit ourselves in our discussion…
> 
> With that… getting back to the issue at hand, ie, the definitions. As a reminder, I reproduced the previous definition below (after my signature). Well, the remaining issue, of course, was to define what exactly the portability is. After looking at Bill's and Deborah's formulations, I was more inspired by the latter (sorry Bill…) but, I believe and as Bill said, we are really at the word-smithing stage here. So here it goes:
> 
> [[[
> • A Web Resource is a ... (see the current glossary [1])
> 
> • Web Document is a ... (see the current glossary [1])
> 
> • A Web Resource in a Web Document is Portable if an OWP compliant user agent can render its essential content by relying exclusively on the Web Resources within the same Web Document.
> 
> • A Portable Web Document is a Web Document whose all constituent Web Resources are Portable.
> ]]]
> 
> I have refreshed [1] to reflect the whole definition.
> 
> How does that sound? Is this an acceptable consensus?
> 
> Ivan
> 
> P.S. Once we have the discussion closed it is probably useful to provide some explanatory text and, especially, to collect and document the various examples we had in the discussion. They will be very useful in explaining the terms. I am happy to do that once we are done…
> 
> P.S.2. This terminological discussion may also influence the way we formulate the next release of the EPUB+WEB document. Actually, this was one of the issues that triggered me to start this thread...
> 
> 
> [1] https://www.w3.org/dpub/IG/wiki/Glossary <https://www.w3.org/dpub/IG/wiki/Glossary>
> 
> ----
> Ivan Herman, W3C
> Digital Publishing Lead
> Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/ <http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/>
> mobile: +31-641044153
> ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704 <http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704>
> 
> Here is the previous version:
> 
> • 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.
> 
> • 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.
> 
> 
> 


----
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