Re: Prioritisation

On 5 August 2015 at 10:36, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org> wrote:

> Leonard,
>
> > On 04 Aug 2015, at 21:38 , Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com> wrote:
> >
> > With the focus here on terminology, I think that we also need to be
> careful about what the definition of a “page” is in this context.
> >
> > In reading over the various messages here, I see (at least) three
> different definitions.
> >
> > 1 – The content that fits on the device’s screen/output without
> requiring any scrolling.
> > 2 – The content that maps to a semantic concept in the publication (eg.
> Index, chapter, article, etc.) and may require scrolling
> > 3 – The content that maps to the printed or fixed layout representation.
> >
>
> I like this differentiation, and I would think that #2 is indeed very
> important but we may want to, eventually, completely dissociate it from the
> concept of paging.
>
> My understanding is that publishers, these days, put some sort of a page
> mark into the digital output (in the form of an invisible element, of a
> metadata, etc.). The purpose of this is to be able to *link* (either
> conceptually or through real hyperlinks) into the document. It is obviously
> important for various use cases that came up in this thread already (and
> others) like academic reference or classroom usage. But, just as you say,
> handling these may require scrolling and that because the concept of these
> anchors are, actually, orthogonal to display, ie, pages in terms of #1 and
> #3.
>
> I think there is an interesting discussion to have on where anchors should
> be put, what is the granularity of those, can (in future) some sort of a
> robust anchoring approach take over the need for these anchors, etc. It is
> largely a usability issue, but I think it is better if we separate it from
> the concept of pagination…
>
> [...]
>

I think we would make progress so much faster if we could refer to chunks
of information (e.g. paragraphs, as lawyers do now) rather than the 100s of
years old physical page model, which is a really too big a target anyway.
But the publishing industry is not exactly forward looking, so I guess
we'll be stuck for a few more decades with having physical pages as the
"version of record". :-(


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Kaveh Bazargan
Director
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