[Glossary] Portable Digital Document's states

Hi all,

Trying to move on to some other terms that we have to agree upon: states. Maybe this is less controversial.

As a reminder: the "Requirement for Web Publication and Packaging"[1] currently defines the following states and their characterization:

 • Online state (i.e., a collection of documents on the Web that can be considered as a logical unit, a "Web Publication")
 • Cached state (i.e., a collection of documents in the reading engine, local system, etc., that can be considered as a logical unit and which is mostly indistinguishable from the online state)
 • Portable state (i.e., an package, ie, a collections of documents packed into one unit for, e.g., a file system, network transfer, etc, but whose content is mostly indistinguishable from the online state)

However, with the terminology around Portable Digital Document (PDD) now written down[2], these definitions must be re-visited. The problems I see are:

- All defintions should be based on the PDD and there are, clearly, overlaps and redundancies
- I am not sure that the terms 'offline' or 'online' are precise and should be used. For example, if I have a PDD on my laptop, and I serve the PDD through a server running on it (ie, using a URL based on http://localhost) then I get a proper display even if I am offline. So in which state would the PDD be?

Here is my first attempt in reformulating the states' terms:

[[[
A Portable Digital Document can be
 • in Unpacked State, when all constituent Web Resources can be directly accessed through standard protocols like HTTP, FTP, etc.
 • in Cached State, when all constituents Web Resources are stored in the User Agent, and the final delivery of the resources in the document are otherwise indistinguishable from when in an Unpacked State
 • in Packed State, when all constituents Web Resources are combined into one unit for, e.g., storage in a file system, network transfer, etc.
]]]

(I am not absolutely convinced, at this point, that the "Cached State" is useful, but I do not have a very strong feeling about it.)

At first glance, it does not fundamentally change our requirement document[1] (which is good)

WDYT?

Ivan

P.S. Note that I use "User Agent" as a more general form. This is the terminology we often use at W3C which, I believe, supersedes both 'Reading Systems' and 'Browsers'. I believe that, also in the spirit of EPUB+WEB, we should stick to this term…


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


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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