Re: On Spreadsheets, Birthday Cards, and the Nature of Publications

Great questions, Dave!

And I would tend to agree with you that the primary benefit for many of these ad-hoc publications is the ability to package them up.  There isn’t anything necessarily special (yet?) in our work on WP itself that is directly beneficial – beyond the use of the OWP.

But since our “design” is that PWP is a WP that is packaged – it then becomes important that we don’t say/do anything in a WP that would preclude the packaging of such things.   That’s why shoulds are better than musts for many things, as it leaves the opening for not doing them in cases where it isn’t necessary (or even logical).

Leonard

From: Dave Cramer <dauwhe@gmail.com>
Date: Monday, August 14, 2017 at 9:27 AM
To: W3C Publishing Working Group <public-publ-wg@w3.org>
Subject: On Spreadsheets, Birthday Cards, and the Nature of Publications
Resent-From: <public-publ-wg@w3.org>
Resent-Date: Monday, August 14, 2017 at 9:27 AM

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