Re: definition of Web Publication

As per my interpretation of discussions in Monday’s call, the objective was to have common agreement on definition, to act as guiding principle for technical development.

With regards
Avneesh
From: Romain 
Sent: Wednesday, July 26, 2017 18:00
To: public-publ-wg@w3.org 
Subject: Re: definition of Web Publication


Hi everyone,

Sorry to deviate slightly from the discussion, but... we're reaching 40+ answers already in this thread, and despite seeing some progress towards consensus and having read some interesting points, I'm not sure I understand the point of the thread [*].

Are we trying to wordsmith a definition that would end up in the spec? or are we trying to get a general agreement on a web publication, to all be on the same page?

In the first case, I would suggest to wait until the technical details of the spec are more advanced, and a definition would probably come much more naturally. Getting the technical points right is more important to the success of our WG IMO, especially given the aggressive timeframe.

In the latter case, I think we probably all have a more or less converging view of what is a Web publication. The devil's in the details, but tackling these details will be more enlightening than just discussing an abstract definition.

Again, it's just my personal opinion, feel free to disagree.

Romain.

[*] besides, perhaps, trying to break the record set by the 90-or-so-reply thread in the IG.

  On 26 Jul 2017, at 14:02, Matt Garrish <matt.garrish@gmail.com> wrote:

  A general +1 to everything you've said, Luc. I also prefer Greg's original wording. I only wonder if it would make sense to be even more explicit that we're creating a work out of the resources, and that's what makes a publication unique. For example:
   
  A Web Publication is an explicitly authored/created collection of one or more constituent resources, bound together through a manifest into a single logical work with a defined though not necessarily required reading order. The Web Publication is uniquely identifiable, presentable using Open Web Platform technologies, and available online or off.
   
  (As a side note, I hate acronyms in specifications and would prefer we avoid WP as a shorthand, even if we use it for simplicity in discussions.)
   
  Matt
   
  From: AUDRAIN LUC [mailto:LAUDRAIN@hachette-livre.fr] 
  Sent: July 26, 2017 4:32 AM
  To: Avneesh Singh <avneesh.sg@gmail.com>; Matt Garrish <matt.garrish@gmail.com>; 'Garth Conboy' <garth@google.com>; 'Laurent Le Meur' <laurent.lemeur@edrlab.org>
  Cc: 'Leonard Rosenthol' <lrosenth@adobe.com>; 'Greg Albers' <GAlbers@getty.edu>; public-publ-wg@w3.org
  Subject: Re: definition of Web Publication
   
  Hi,
   
  Boundedness/boudaries and creator intent: Work
  This is where the library FRBR model brought us in IG to speak about « “manifested” (in the FRBR [frbr] sense) ».
  There is a boundary around what has been chosen, curated, included in the WP by the creator/editor. 
    a.. I use creator and not author, so that we don’t think it is only for books… IMO, it is also relevant for any document
    a.. I think it is more than « organized ». In the « FRBR sense », it brings the idea of a manifestation of a work.
    a.. The creator's intent makes him create and/or choose content that represent for him/her an intellectual idea, the work. 
    b.. A WP is a possibility to manifest in digital form this work 
   
  This confort the idea that a WP differs from a website by its manifest (that should reflect somehow the manifestation boundaries)
  => I support Greg’s wording « A Web Publication (WP) is a[n explicitly authored/created] collection of one or more constituent resources, bound together »
   
  Controlled updating:
  We shouldn’t limit these boundaries to « static content ».
  I like here the idea brought by Jason « an algorithm »: WP content should be updatable under the control of a creator algorithm.
  This kind of updating includes the dynamic view of the web in the boundaries of the WP.
   
  Out of bounds: a generic link to a Web page that may disappear in time is IMO 
  Within bounds: an internal process included by the creator in a WP making a call to a controlled set of data from a reliable source
   
  => the WP Definition should somehow reflects this essential processable nature of WP, perhaps in adding that algorithm are among the primary resources?
   
  Best,
  Luc
   
  De : Avneesh Singh <avneesh.sg@gmail.com>
  Date : mercredi 26 juillet 2017 à 05:57
  À : Matt Garrish <matt.garrish@gmail.com>, 'Garth Conboy' <garth@google.com>, 'Laurent Le Meur' <laurent.lemeur@edrlab.org>
  Cc : 'Leonard Rosenthol' <lrosenth@adobe.com>, 'Greg Albers' <GAlbers@getty.edu>, "public-publ-wg@w3.org" <public-publ-wg@w3.org>
  Objet : Re: definition of Web Publication
  Renvoyer - De : <public-publ-wg@w3.org>
  Renvoyer - Date : mercredi 26 juillet 2017 à 05:57
   
  We have developed a lot of usecases on basis of current stage of publishing industry, which is good.
  At the same time, the publishing industry is likely to evolve with time, and soon we may see the publications that are updated on weekly or even daily basis.
  I see the following differences between publications and webpages.
  1. Publisher defined Boundaries and reading order for at least primary resources. 
  2. Well defined information about major and minor updates.
  3. well defined metadata (point 2 is also related to it).
  4. Online as well as offline access.
   
  With regards
  Avneesh
  From: Matt Garrish 
  Sent: Wednesday, July 26, 2017 05:09
  To: 'Garth Conboy' ; 'Laurent Le Meur' 
  Cc: 'Leonard Rosenthol' ; 'Greg Albers' ; public-publ-wg@w3.org
  Subject: RE: definition of Web Publication
   
  The phrase "intentional curation" sounds more like what web publications enable than a characteristic of the content, although I appreciate what is being sought with it.
   
  And leaving out boundedness from the definition while it was heavily emphasized in the vision document doesn't make a lot of sense to me. What makes publications unique from web pages is the idea that they represent a bounded work, even if the bound is a single document. If that's not true, then can we really call these "web publications" or are they just "identifiable document sets on the web"?
   
  Matt
   
  From: Garth Conboy [mailto:garth@google.com] 
  Sent: July 25, 2017 5:12 PM
  To: Laurent Le Meur <laurent.lemeur@edrlab.org>
  Cc: Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com>; Greg Albers <GAlbers@getty.edu>; public-publ-wg@w3.org
  Subject: Re: definition of Web Publication
   
  And to a certain extent these "bounds" could also be the part of the publication that is published on the publication date, and can be expected not to change without a new publication.  This lack of change after publication is key to me (or at least some way to get back to the "originally published content") -- signatures may play a role here.
   
  Best,
     Garth
   
  On Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 1:34 PM, Laurent Le Meur <laurent.lemeur@edrlab.org> wrote:
    The bounds of a WP are IMO the resources that will be packaged when a PWP is created. Take the exemple of an html page (a primary resource of a WP) containing a video hosted on YouTube. The video content will stay out of the boundaries of the PWP. We can package some constituents of a WP, not all of them.
     
    Laurent
     
      Le 25 juil. 2017 à 22:20, Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com> a écrit :
       
      I don’t understand how a user would ever know (or care) about the “bounds” of a WP.  Can you give an example?
       
      At its simplest, a PWP is a WP that has been packaged up into a single physical container of content (ala EPUB).  Beyond that, we still have lots of work to do to understand how (if at all) it would differ from a WP. 
       
      On the “states” issue, we spent a *lot* of time in the IG trying to use that states model and when we presented it to the rest of the W3C it was too confusing for many as it’s a very complex grid.   It’s also not clear whether we actually need all the various differences in that grid given many things going on with the OWP itself…
       
      Leonard
       
      From: Greg Albers <GAlbers@getty.edu>
      Date: Tuesday, July 25, 2017 at 3:30 PM
      To: Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com>
      Cc: Laurent Le Meur <laurent.lemeur@edrlab.org>, "public-publ-wg@w3.org" <public-publ-wg@w3.org>
      Subject: Re: definition of Web Publication
       
      Thanks all. Glad to be here and I think, now that I gave the w3c permission to archive my posts, they'll show up here normally.
       
      Leonard, good thoughts, thanks! On this though:
       
      ?       “bound” vs. organized:  The word bound, to me, feels more like packaging – and so I think we should avoid it for now.  But it’s a good word for when we get to PWP
       
      I would argue that a Web Publication, whether packaged or not, must have a sense of boundedness. That those boundaries and a users implicit or explicit understanding of them are a key to exactly what distinguishes a web publication from a website. Particularly from a user's (reader's) perspective, whereas yes, I think from a user agent's perspective, it is the manifest. That makes a lot of sense to me.
       
      A related question I had for you all was around the distinction between a WP and a PWP. To me packaging is a state of a WP not a separate entity from it. And even in our charter it states the PWP as something that we might define and spec out but that we might not depending on activities elsewhere in the w3c. Shouldn't then our definition of a WP encompass its states more holistically. Online v offline, packaged v not packaged, with everything v only with essential resources, etc...? 
       
      Thanks,
      Greg 
       
       

      Sent from my iPhone

      On Jul 25, 2017, at 10:54 AM, Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com> wrote:

        Greg had an excellent point about curation, so let me try to add that in using a term that we’ve been trying out here (so feedback on that welcome too)
         
        A Web Publication (WP) is an intentionally curated collection of one or more Web resources organized together through a manifest and presented to users using Open Web Platform technologies.
         
        There were some other things in the suggestion that I didn’t take and I’d like to explain
        ?       “bound” vs. organized:  The word bound, to me, feels more like packaging – and so I think we should avoid it for now.  But it’s a good word for when we get to PWP
        ?       “uniquely identifiable grouping”: As we have discussed, identification of a WP is a separate issue so that doesn’t belong in the definition
        ?       “reading order”: Having this in the manifest definition, I saw no need to duplicate it in the WP definition.
         
        Leonard
         
        From: Leonard Rosenthol <lrosenth@adobe.com>
        Date: Tuesday, July 25, 2017 at 1:34 PM
        To: Laurent Le Meur <laurent.lemeur@edrlab.org>, "public-publ-wg@w3.org" <public-publ-wg@w3.org>
        Subject: Re: definition of Web Publication
        Resent-From: <public-publ-wg@w3.org>
        Resent-Date: Tuesday, July 25, 2017 at 1:34 PM
         
        Laurent - good rewrites, but let me play with it a bit…
         
        Do we really need the middle sentence? It doesn’t say anything useful (IMO).   The first and third, however are good.   We can then put it all together as:
         
        A Web Publication (WP) is a collection of one or more Web resources organized together through a manifest and presented to users using Open Web Platform technologies.
         
        Now to apply some simplification to the Manifest definition:
         
        A manifest is structured information about a Web Publication, such as informative metadata and the default reading order of its primary constituents. 
         
        I’m not thrilled with that since it’s still not clear to me if we want all that stuff (metadata + resources + reading order + ….) in a single “manifest” *or* we will end up with multiple ones (but even then, it may still conceptually be a manifest).
         
        Thoughts?
         
        Leonard
         
        From: Laurent Le Meur <laurent.lemeur@edrlab.org>
        Date: Tuesday, July 25, 2017 at 11:38 AM
        To: "public-publ-wg@w3.org" <public-publ-wg@w3.org>
        Cc: W3C Publishing Working Group <public-publ-wg@w3.org>
        Subject: Re: definition of Web Publication
        Resent-From: <public-publ-wg@w3.org>
        Resent-Date: Tuesday, July 25, 2017 at 11:38 AM
         
        The current definition is facing a large set of comments. From these comments, I tried a variant of Matt's proposal:
         
        A Web Publication (WP) is a collection of one or more Web resources organized together through a manifest. The content of a Web Publication can take a wide variety of forms, from formal artistic and intellectual works to ad hoc documents and memos. Web Publications are presented to end-users using Open Web Platform technologies.
         
        A manifest is the structured information necessary for the proper identification and description of a Web Publication, plus the default reading order of its primary constituents. 
         
        Laurent

Received on Wednesday, 26 July 2017 12:51:01 UTC