addressable identifier?

In another thread Hadrien said:

> "[the] URL [of the manifest] identifies the publication as a whole", that's where we have a pretty massive disagreement as I believe that the URL of the manifest is a perfect fit to identify the publication as a whole, but others (Dave, Garth for example) want a URL that returns HTML instead (not sure why an identifier MUST return HTML, but anyway...)


I think I was in the "others" group, but I believe there's a misunderstanding about what we're talking about.

What we all probably agree on the obvious:

- a publication has a manifest, which is addressable (it has a URL)
- a publication has HTML content ("primary resources", it seems), which is addressable (each primary resource has a URL)
- assuming that the manifest is an external non-HTML document (read JSON), its URL is different from any of the URLs to the HTML content.


I can see how a UA will want to directly process URLs to non-HTML manifests, for instance to parse the catalog from a store.
I would also hope that a web site pointing to a Publication would use a URL to an HTML resource (so that the link can be opened and rendered in a non-supporting browser).

But these are use cases for **links**, not **identifiers**.

So, my question is: what is the envisioned use case for an "addressable identifier"? does it matter or can we assume that there's no need for a canonical location and we just point to whatever makes the most sense depending on the context?

Romain.

PS: the PWP UCR contains one use case about uniquely identifying a Web Publication [1], but I'm not sure I see to which extent this use case requires more than the ability to link to the content. The UC doesn't make a strong case for the uniqueness requirement.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/pwp-ucr/#unique-identifier

Received on Thursday, 27 July 2017 16:31:50 UTC