AW: Can a publication change over time?

If any resource in a WP (primary or secondary) may change or be deleted at any time after its publication, worst case without notice to the author/creator and/or the reader/user, I’m afraid that we lose the sense of a separate publication from a definable origin, traditionally the publisher or the author as self-publisher.

When a customer buys a license for a certain product to consume it online or offline, he or she may like it to get regular updates - ideally for free, but not necessarily without any notice and without the option to reject the offered upgrade. Suppose you were reading a chapter, stop at a certain position in the evening and the next day when you want to continue, you would discover that the current chapter has been thoroughly revised. IMO, this would be an awkward experience.

Another issue I see is proper quotations in scientific works. If I don’t have a reliable and stable method to quote from or refer to a specific version of a publication, academia would be unable to use a WP because in writing a paper you could not establish a durable point of reference.

I would suppose that the business model of any publisher would require that a license will not include any update “for infinity”, but that enhancements of any kind will be treated as another version that has to be paid

But I’m fully aware that there are also open source, collaborative publications on the Web or mashups that could change any time.

Could we define a mechanism to accommodate these 2 types of publications which will differ in terms of stability/”boundedness”?

Von: Garth Conboy [mailto:garth@google.com]
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 27. Juli 2017 19:00
An: Hadrien Gardeur
Cc: Baldur Bjarnason; Laurent Le Meur; public-publ-wg@w3.org
Betreff: Re: Can a publication change over time?

Indeed, that may be desirable.

But, our mission is to bring publishing to the Web.  It's pretty fundamental to (traditional) publishing to write or cobble together a set of "resources" and have said publication not change (or at least know if it changes) over time.  We may end up not being able to find a viable complete equivalent on the Web, but lets not run away too soon, as there are clearly technologies that could possibly be applied.

Best,
   Garth


On Thu, Jul 27, 2017 at 9:17 AM, Hadrien Gardeur <hadrien.gardeur@feedbooks.com<mailto:hadrien.gardeur@feedbooks.com>> wrote:
> If you start messing around with immutability, update mechanisms, and resource versioning, you get pretty deep into dark corners of the HTTP ecosystem pretty quickly.

+1, which is why I'd like to avoid such requirements