Some significant items for discussion on "What is a Web Publication?"

While working on the PWP document today, I can into a few things that I’d like to raise for discussion (either via email or phone tomorrow, or both).

Let’s start right up front with the definition of a Web Publication ☺.   It currently reads “A Web Publication (WP) is a bounded collection of resources, envisioned and created as a whole”.  I would like to review the second half of that sentence – about the envisioned and created as a whole.  In the world of documents, the most popular feature of processing applications is the ability to combine parts of other documents together to create a new one.  In that use case, the resources weren’t “envisioned and created as a whole”.  You could say that the author/publisher envisioned that collection and intentionally collated those resources together – but that’s different from what is here.  I would also put forth that the application of annotations to a WP can create a new WP that also was not “envisioned and created as a whole”.


There is a requirement that “The package must include the unique identifier of the manifestation—a Web Publication’s origin is essential information if a PWP becomes portable”.  Two paragraphs later it goes into further detail about the origin inclusion and even mentions trust. Unfortunately, that requirement seems to imply some potential implementation considerations that the WebPackaging work is proving to not be feasible – see https://github.com/dimich-g/webpackage/issues/7.  I would like to remove the second half of that sentence (about the origin) and also remove the bit about trust from the latest paragraph.  Let’s just leave it open that we want a unique identifier, but that’s it, and that the origin is not necessarily related to the identifier.


Here’s the one where George, Charles and others are going to be scream – but I believe it is an extremely important point – you can’t mandate accessibility in a WP (ie. “A Web Publication must be accessible to the broadest possible range of readers”). We should make it a strong recommendation (a “should” vs. a “shall” in ISO terminology) and do all we can to promote this direction.  However, given our goals to support not only curated publications but also ad-hoc publications, it is not reasonable to expect them all to be accessible.  Just as not every page on the web is accessible, web publications need not be either.


Another area that we cannot mandate – but should make a strong recommendation – is that “A Web Publication must be available and functional while the user is offline”. An author may produce a publication that is only designed to be used online – for example, one that connects to an online system. We don’t wish to prevent the development of such a publication.


Finally, I think we say too much about the use of the manifest.  It says “We also introduce the abstract concept of a manifest, which serves to carry information about the constituent resources of the publication, their sequence, and presentation”.  I think we should only say that it carries the resources and not mention sequence and presentation. This is consistent with our statement, earlier in the same section, about how we aren’t going to define “manifest” (and leave it in the generic FRBR sense).


Leonard