RE: New type of article storage system - Google?

+1, and btw the latest generation of the Adobe Digital Publishing Platform has transitioned to "article" as a fundamental unit (the file is a ".article" file, which contains metadata, a thumbnail, and the content) and "collection" to group articles. This turns inside-out the previous model (put in magazine terms) of an "issue" as fundamental, with articles within it. Instead, the article is fundamental and articles get grouped into "collection"s, one type of which is an issue, but there are many other collections ("Best of 2015"; "Celebrating Queen Elizabeth's Historic Reign") that a given article can be a part of. And while this is an app, it supports fully responsive HTML5 with Media Queries. Big deal in the magazine world, which in many ways has been stuck in a distribute-by-issue model that needs to transition to a distribute-by-article model, and is dominated by Adobe DPS.—Bill Kasdorf


From: Bill McCoy [mailto:bmccoy@idpf.org]
Sent: Saturday, September 19, 2015 12:37 PM
To: Ivan Herman
Cc: W3C Digital Publishing IG; Ralph Swick
Subject: Re: New type of article storage system - Google?

I have no inside information but yes I would think it very interesting to keep an eye out for more details, particularly as it sounds like it will not be a branded proprietary solution but something open source and positioned as more generic. I'd venture a guess it will involve both packaging and perhaps also pre-digestion of HTML/CSS to something that can be quickly and easily digested by browser and native apps (JSON perhaps, as has been done in other contexts such as Kobo's online reader for EPUB).

I do think that the "article" is a very interesting unit for us to consider, since not just blogs and other websites but many books, textbooks, journals, and  longer works are essentially made up of aggregated articles... a "chapter" could even be considered a subclass of article. So thinking of "article" as in some ways the most fundamental atomic unit of compound publications could be a useful perspective. InDesign's basic building block of compound content is the "story" which is arguably also isomorphic to "article".

--Bill

On Sat, Sep 19, 2015 at 8:45 AM, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org<mailto:ivan@w3.org>> wrote:
A colleague drew my attention to this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/technology/google-twitter-and-publishers-seek-faster-web.html?_r=0


[[
SAN FRANCISCO — In a world where many people read everything on mobile
phones, a few seconds of load time can mean the gain or loss of millions
of readers and advertising dollars.

Now Google wants to help publishers — and itself — by speeding things up.

Google is working with the social media service Twitter and major news
publishers like The Guardian and The New York Times to create a new kind
of web link and article storage system that would load online news
articles and digital magazine pieces in a few milliseconds, according to
several people involved in the project. That is a fraction of the five
to 10 seconds it can take to load a typical website.
...
]]

Does anybody know more about this? Is it something that we should keep an eye on, that we should know more about?

Thanks

Ivan


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

mobile: +31-641044153<tel:%2B31-641044153>
ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704







--

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