RE: Musings on PWP Offline/Online Modes

That's getting a little far afield, I think. Many scholarly publications—even as short as a single journal article—reference hundreds of other publications. It would never be anybody's intention to include those in a PWP.

This also gets way out on thin ice on the ownership issue. Somebody creating PWP 1 would run into a lot of resistance if she pointed to PWP 2 and PWP 3, each authored by others, and asserted that they are now part of her PWP 1. Referencing them, okay; _including_ them, not so much. Depending of course on the rights asserted for PWP 2 and PWP 3; certain CC licenses would actually permit that, others wouldn't.

--Bill K

From: Nick Ruffilo [mailto:nickruffilo@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, January 04, 2016 3:52 PM
To: Charles LaPierre
Cc: DPUB mailing list (public-digipub-ig@w3.org)
Subject: Re: Musings on PWP Offline/Online Modes

Another benefit would also be in instant creation of volumes.  Imagine that you could link to an additional PWP...  Lets ignore the possibility for recursion and simply insanely large additions (because these are solvable things, although worth noting)

I don't know TOO much about scholarly publishing, but I can imagine being a student writing a thesis paper, and including a host of referenced materials.  Imagine if all of those materials could be included - and THEIR references.  In most cases, a link would suffice (and SHOULD suffice) but there are cases where one would want to include the entire reference to allow for deep-reading in an offline mode given a consistent and unchanging set of data...



On Mon, Jan 4, 2016 at 3:44 PM, Charles LaPierre <charlesl@benetech.org<mailto:charlesl@benetech.org>> wrote:
I like this idea Nick, especially the part about

This could have many benefits.  Imagine that there are a bunch of scholarly publications that all reference a single image/diagram.  The web-based PWP version can reference a single online canonical URL, whereas the offline PWP can have it's own local instance (meaning less duplication, and the ability to update all the online PWPs at once if there is an update to that image.  This is OPTIONAL, so if someone wanted to do a snapshot, they just reference a local image.


Now lets say there is are extended descriptions for this image, a 3D model of this image, and/or a Tactile representation of this image with a Tour description explaining what the tactile image is.  Now this is done only once and all PWP’s would point to this image with its attached extended descriptions.  The packager which would create the offline version could also grab these extended descriptions as well.  Custom Elements could be used here to interact with these alternative representations of the image.

Thanks.

Charles LaPierre
Sr. Software Engineer
charlesl@benetech.org<mailto:charlesl@benetech.org>


On Jan 4, 2016, at 9:28 AM, Nick Ruffilo <nickruffilo@gmail.com<mailto:nickruffilo@gmail.com>> wrote:



The conversation today got me thinking - and maybe it's the new year crazies, but I got to thinking of the true value of having something of a PWP "engine" that would provide unique value.  Below are some use cases and what I feel is an interesting way to handle those cases:

The "vanilla" fully-offline package
This is probably closest to what epub is today.  All the files for the PWP are located in the same base, and besides the occasional <a href=""> link that points to an external resource, all items are contained within a package.  With little effort, the package can exist on a server and as long as there is a reading system that can handle the manifest, the content can be read in a linear or whatever method we end up with.

I think we're all in agreement here - ignoring word choice like manifest, etc.


The web-page-in-a-box
Fonts live on other servers, images live on other servers, CSS Frameworks live on a CDN, It's a beautiful (messy) web.  How does this become offline?  This would require heavy lifting on the part of the browser or the server (whatever generates the document) but imagine if the packager could take these resources offline.

Example: I'm reading a wikipedia article, and I want to download it as a PWP.  Wikipedia could specify a list of resources (heck, even a hyper-minified version of their CSS) as well as all the images related to that Wikipedia article.  All of those get packaged into a PWP that I can download and read whenever.  YES IT WILL BE A SNAPSHOT of the page at that time, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing...  It could even have update instructions (or an update URL).

External resources get added to the root path in some way like: /http/somedomaincom/path/to/external/file.css

This could have many benefits.  Imagine that there are a bunch of scholarly publications that all reference a single image/diagram.  The web-based PWP version can reference a single online canonical URL, whereas the offline PWP can have it's own local instance (meaning less duplication, and the ability to update all the online PWPs at once if there is an update to that image.  This is OPTIONAL, so if someone wanted to do a snapshot, they just reference a local image.

For publishers - they could have a common CSS framework that they could keep up-to-date, so that if they found a bug, or decided that they wanted body color to be bright orange, they could update it once, and all new offline PWPs that are generated get that.

Since this is 100% optional, those who wanted full control can simply opt to create their content fully within a single root.  The ability to be able to specify certain online resources to be "critical" to an offline package could create production benefits (and yes, I realize it could also create some headaches).



--
- Nick Ruffilo
@NickRuffilo
http://Aerbook.com<http://aerbook.com/>
http://twitch.tv/TheWizardLlewyn

http://ZenOfTechnology.com<http://zenoftechnology.com/>








--
- Nick Ruffilo
@NickRuffilo
http://Aerbook.com

http://twitch.tv/TheWizardLlewyn

http://ZenOfTechnology.com<http://zenoftechnology.com/>