Re: Another way forward? (Just an idea for discussion)

On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 11:50 AM, John Foliot <john.foliot@deque.com> wrote:
> Greetings all,
>
> As part of an APA task I was assigned, I recently reviewed another W3C
> Working Draft ("Web Publications Use Cases and Requirements -
> https://www.w3.org/TR/pwp-ucr/) which introduces a proposed concept of a
> Manifest file, defined there as:
>
> "...an abstract means to contain information necessary to the proper
> management, rendering, and so on, of a publication. This is opposed to
> metadata that contains information on the content of the publication like
> author, publication date, and so on. The precise format of how such a
> manifest is stored is not considered in this document."
>
> I began to wonder aloud if using a similar mechanism (up to, and including
> piggy-backing on the Digital Publishing's IG concept of 'manifest' above)
> might not be a more efficient and economical way of capturing and conveying
> personalization options at a site-wide level (as opposed to the "page" or
> single-screen level). I could envision this addressing concerns from both
> the COGA and LV Task Forces in a fashion that scales efficiently for
> developers.
>
> While I don't have a clear vision of how all of this might be accomplished
> today, it strikes me as well that working in concert with the Digital
> Publishing Group on this piece of the larger puzzle could be quite fruitful.
>

Interesting. I'm curious about how people envision the flow of
information with regards to personalization. Our ultimate goal is
reader control over some aspects of presentation. But how can the
reader express their requirements, and how can content authors respond
to those requirements? The user stylesheet was the original solution,
but that hasn't exactly been a huge success. There seems to be some
interest in setting user preferences at the operating system level,
which content authors can discover through media features—the
prefers-reduced-motion media query is an example.

Would the role of a web application manifest in this scenario be
purely to provide metadata—to advertise to the user agent (and thus
the user) that this web content does contain affordances for a defined
list of user preferences? That sounds fine to me, but I do want to
avoid having actual rendering information in some new format.

Regards,

Dave Cramer

Received on Thursday, 4 May 2017 03:52:59 UTC