On Spreadsheets, Birthday Cards, and the Nature of Publications

As we've discussed various issues on GitHub, our esteemed colleague from
Adobe has provided examples of potential web publications which seem, to my
dinosaur dead-tree publisher eyes, to be rather far removed from what I
think of as publications.

Leonard has often spoken of "ad-hoc publications," such as memos, reports,
letters—the output of tools that are categorized with words like "office"
and "document" and "productivity". And of course we can can make such
documents using HTML/CSS/JS, and we should, ’cause HTML is cool and CSS is
awe-
some.

But how would a birthday card or a spreadsheet benefit from being a web
publication? They are unlikely to consist of more than one primary
resource, and the existing web platform seems entirely capable of providing
a good user experience, except for one thing. Such "ad-hoc publications"
would benefit from being packaged and portable.

But do we need to design web publications around these types of documents,
when packaging is likely the only feature they require? Can we usefully
separate the concept of packaging from other aspects of web publications?

Dave