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

Point taken, but I can't resist pointing out two truisms of our current situation:

--Everybody's a publisher. ;-)

--Every web page is a publication. (Not every publication is a web page.)

From: Ivan Herman [mailto:ivan@w3.org]
Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2015 12:59 AM
To: Bill Kasdorf
Cc: Leonard Rosenthol; W3C Digital Publishing IG; Brady Duga; Ralph Swick
Subject: Re: [Glossary] Definition of a portable document (and other things...)

(Changed the subject line to 'move' it, at least in term of the subject, to the other thread…)

On 23 Sep 2015, at 24:13 , Bill Kasdorf <bkasdorf@apexcovantage.com<mailto:bkasdorf@apexcovantage.com>> wrote:

I know I'm coming late—probably too late—to this conversation. But I have a very serious reservation about PWD, and it's the D part. I have long advocated the term "publication." The reason is that a publication is typically composed of many documents. The most obvious case is that an EPUB often contains multiple content documents. I think it is very misleading to characterize this package as "a document." That encourages people to envision it as something much simpler that it usually is. It's a publication, even if it _does_ only consist of a single document.

I understand what you say and… I am not convinced:-(. But are walking a fine line here.

By using the term "document" which is, in general, the term used for web content (apart from a 'page':-) we emphasize the fundamental role these "things" play on the Web (which is the medium we are interested in). By using "publication", even if it it is a "Web Publication" we tend to push (back…) the publishing community in its silo that the rest of the Web community should not care about. As I said, all this is a fine line, but makes me keep the term "Document"…

Cheers

Ivan




Sorry I missed the conversation when it was happening, but it was unavoidable.

From: Leonard Rosenthol [mailto:lrosenth@adobe.com]
Sent: Monday, September 21, 2015 8:03 AM
To: Ivan Herman; W3C Digital Publishing IG
Cc: Brady Duga; Ralph Swick; Bill Kasdorf
Subject: Re: [Glossary] Portable Digital Document's states

As you note, Ivan – there are subtleties involved in actually trying to spell out what each of the quadrants means.  Your example of an unpacked PWD accessed locally via web protocols is a good one, but it could just as easily have been a packaged PWD accessed that same way – in fact, I built one of those back in 2011 as part some work we were doing.

But more importantly, the two sets of dimensions are indeed key and for the reasons you state – one for the defining the packaging technology to be used for a PWD and the other for influencing the identification mechanism.

Also, now that we have defined a term – Portable Web Document (PWD) - how about using that in all instances where you might previously have written EPUB?   It took us a lot of time/effort to get to that term – let’s use it!

Leonard

From: Ivan Herman
Date: Monday, September 21, 2015 at 7:18 AM
To: W3C Digital Publishing IG
Cc: "Brady com>", Ralph Swick, Bill Kasdorf, Leonard Rosenthol
Subject: Re: [Glossary] Portable Digital Document's states

So… it seems that we do have two dimensions for 'states. Because Ascii art can go very bad with different clients, I created images as attachments. The first attached image shows is the offline/online vs. packed/unpacked situation with some typical usage scenarios.

However, offline/online may be an elusive notion. I would think (although I am not sure) that it may be more precise to differentiate along access methods: in practice, if we are in a Web setting, the difference may be whether the content is accessed via an HTTP(S) protocol, through Web protocols, or whether the content is accessed through a file system. So I created a second image doing that.  Note the difference between the two: if I have an unpacked set of files in a folder, the same content can be accessed via the file system or via a server running on my machine with the same content served through HTTP. Although, in both cases, the content is accessed offline, the access method is different.

Whichever four states we choose (and their definitions should be properly pinned down) the real question for this Interest Group is which of these states are of real interest (sic!) for the group and for the digital publishing community at large. And, in fact, I believe all four are. Indeed,

- the packed/unpacked dimension is (obviously) of interest for the details and requirements on packaging; ie, it influences the details on an architectural view for some sort of a unified approach for readers' core (our service worker based scenario)

- the offline/online or, alternatively, file or protocol access dimension raises questions on identifiers. Do we use generic identifiers overall, regardless of locations, how should the references within a Portable Web Document be organized to ensure a unified identification scheme. (I cc-d BillK explicitly, because I know these questions are of a real interest to him:-)

If we agree with these two dimensions, we can go forward and define them more thoroughly

Ivan

On 18 Sep 2015, at 18:21 , Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com<mailto:lrosenth@adobe.com>> wrote:

Yes, I believe that caching is more an implementation issue than a format or design issue.

From: Ivan Herman
Date: Friday, September 18, 2015 at 9:07 AM
To: Leonard Rosenthol
Cc: "Brady com>", W3C Digital Publishing IG, Ralph Swick
Subject: Re: [Glossary] Portable Digital Document's states


On 18 Sep 2015, at 14:35 , Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com<mailto:lrosenth@adobe.com>> wrote:

[Sorry for coming in late]

I agree with Brady – there is a huge difference between package/unpackaged and online/offline.  The original terms made more sense to me as they focused on whether the content was usable without standard web protocols (aka offline) or not.

Indeed. As I say below, we seem to have two different dimension for 'states' and not one dimension only. I can be unpacked and offline, and packed and online. So the question is whether defining two types of states (offline/online and packed/unpacked) is enough. Ie, whether treating cached separately on any dimension is necessary or not (my feeling is that it is not, it is more of an implementation issue).

Ivan



----
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




<image001.jpg><image002.jpg>


----
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