Web app vs. Web Publications

Dave,

on your text… there is one aspect that I am not sure how to formulate but I think should somehow be part of the text in the very first paragraph of the intro section:

[[[
The Web emerged in 1994, based on a model of individually-authored documents loosely tied together by hyperlinks. Since then, those Web “pages” have evolved into Web sites and Web Apps, with smaller and smaller bits of content, generated by more and more users or databases, with increasing amounts of interactivity. The Web has become a swarm of small stuff, changing very quickly. Although we still talk about pages, this model has little to do with that much older, yet still very powerful, paged-based media we call books.

]]]

I think when saying "smaller and smaller bits of content" this may be understood as a bit, shall we say, derogative, which we should of course avoid. I view the evolution is a little bit differently. What I think happened is that the Web & Browser, as some sort of a "Web Operating System" came to the fore (look at the fact that the most active area of development these days is the definition of a flock of various APIS…)  which led to a number of interactive applications on the Web that we call Web Apps. It is not a matter of 'smaller content', it is a matter of a shifting paradigm of what the Web is used for. When one looks at web email clients, banking applications, social web sites, etc, the question is not a smaller bit of content, it is rather that these applications do not really aim at documents _at all_. It is not their concern. It is not the notion of a 'book' in Hugh's sense in the abstract.

Where I see one of the values of the work on WP-s is not to go back to the roots of the Web in the sense of negatint the evolution towards the Web Operating Systems, but rather to acknowledge that there _is_ such a bifurcation, and therefore we must look at a "Document Web" again albeit in a modern setting. Of course, the borderline between Web Apps Web and Document Web is fuzzy, and that is absolutely fine, but acknowledging that there _is_ a difference is important. We may end up with a duality on the Web, which we would have to embrace...

I do not think we disagree, it is more the way to present things. You are much better at formulating this...

Cheers

Ivan

P.S. I have made some minor edits on the document, see https://github.com/w3c/dpub-pwp/pull/35

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Ivan Herman, W3C
Digital Publishing Technical Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
mobile: +31-641044153
ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704