Re: Can a publication change over time?

I agree that from a publishing and distribution perspective—particularly educational publishing—WP support for continuous updates will be critical.

Publishers tend to view traditional (i.e., print) publications similar to how developers view releases and snapshots, except we call them printings and editions. Publications are indeed "published" at a certain time and with a certain robustness and completeness of content, but this content can evolve continuously throughout the publication's lifespan. Even editions can be viewed as sequential, major versions of a publication. In fact, this is how we at Norton approach ebook versioning in EPUB.

That said, I agree with Hadrien's thoughts. I also add that the (traditional) publishing use case for continuous updates will more likely resemble coherent "releases" than minor incremental updates, at least until our digital distribution model evolves so drastically as to make such minor updates easy to implement and to push to the world. Perhaps a way to approach this in WP is a recognition that WPs can be updated, but must be done so with a specific version tagged to it—there are others in the WG who could word this more eloquently and technically than I can.


From: Hadrien Gardeur <hadrien.gardeur@feedbooks.com>
Date: Tuesday, July 25, 2017 at 3:06 PM
To: Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com>
Cc: "public-publ-wg@w3.org" <public-publ-wg@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Can a publication change over time?
Resent-From: <public-publ-wg@w3.org>
Resent-Date: Tuesday, July 25, 2017 at 3:05 PM

Since we're on the Web, I think it's safe to say that everything can and will be updated over time. No matter what we say and write, this won't change the way things work on the Web.

During the call, someone said (Garth maybe?) that the main concern is tied to the primary resources of a publication.

I think these primary resources will also be updated and change over time, here are a few different examples:

  *   it's fairly common for technical books to be updated over time (some publishers have beta books, but with platforms like Gitbook you can expect even more regular updates)
  *   serialized fiction (comics, manga but also general fiction) could be distributed as a WP per fragment/chapter, but it might be easier for the reader to simply point them to a WP that will be updated over time with more content
  *   Librivox audiobook releases are produced by a community over time, it would make perfect sense to have a WP for the complete publication, with new updates as the community releases new audio files
  *   Jiminy Panoz provided a use case in the Github issue about remixing<https://github.com/w3c/wpub/issues/8#issuecomment-317539201> that is also relevant here, since a publisher could dynamically provide specific part of a publication (author bio, highlighted titles, titles from the same author etc.)
These are all examples where the ability to update a WP really shines and adds value compared to EPUB.

Hadrien

2017-07-25 19:45 GMT+02:00 Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com<mailto:lrosenth@adobe.com>>:
There seems to have been a good discussion on this at the meeting that I missed ☹.   And I didn’t see a specific resolution to the topic, so I figured I’d pull it out here for further review.

In my view, Garth said it best (copied from the minutes):
<garth> Publishing: defining the parts that won’t change over time.

This means that a WP can contain resources that are a mix of “static” (unchanging) content and “dynamic” (changing) content.  I have two favorite examples (aka real world use cases) of this:

  1.  A textbook where the quizzes can be changed by the professor for their specific class
  2.  A data dashboard that is able to display the current data

Does anyone believe differently about a WP and its ability to contain “dynamic” content?

Leonard
P.S. I am specifically *NOT* talking about PWP here – just WP.