RE: addressable identifier?

But I wonder if a couple of the concerns that have been raised on this thread are red herrings?

On the Web, even in a Semantic Web / RDF context, the idea of canonical has just not held up well in most general contexts, in spite of the fact that you do see canonical as a value for many link rel attributes. Persistence of URL(s) for a Web Publication is critical, but Web resources, like people, in spite of our preferences, may be known by more than a single, canonical identifier (name).  I would argue we may not want to make a single canonical URL a core requirement - though we certainly could encourage it as a best practice.

The HTML versus non-HTML manifest URL raised earlier in this thread could potentially also be dealt with more as a matter of serialization and composition than as a one or the other binary choice.  For a UA wanting HTML, the URL pointing to the manifest could result in an HTML representation that embeds the manifest, e.g., as a script type="application/json" or type="application/ld+json. This representation (if the publisher so desired) could then also include/embed  by reference the 'primary' resource, so that to a Web browser user it looks like he or she has received the content of interest right away.  Machines reading this HTML would see the manifest in addition to the primary resource, or could just request the manifest only through content negotiation (if the publisher wished to offer this option or if we make manifest serialized a specific non-HTML way a minimum requirement).

As said, we have options here, I would just not want to be overly prescriptive when not required.

-Tim Cole

________________________________
From: Hadrien Gardeur [hadrien.gardeur@feedbooks.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 27, 2017 13:20
To: Romain
Cc: Laurent Le Meur; W3C Publishing Working Group
Subject: Re: addressable identifier?

OK, makes sense.
But then, the URL to a manifest may change, or two different URLs can point to the same manifest:

https://resilientwebdesign.com/manifest.json
https://resilientwebdesign.com/books/../manifest.json<https://resilientwebdesign.com/manifest.json>

That's why using a canonical location is also useful and makes sense for the WP identifier.


All I'm saying is I understand the manifest _can_ be used as an identifier in a given context (e.g. a UA), but there's nothing to say about that in the spec, right? There's a URL, people can use that as an identifier or not.

It's entirely up to us to decide that.


As far as I can tell, there's no such concept in web sites and apps, and I don't see that publications need anything other than a loosely specified "dc:identifier" property in metadata. (Maybe I'm wrong, I'm just not convinced yet :-)

We're trying to figure out how we're different from plain websites. We agreed that the difference is mostly the manifest, having a canonical location for the manifest and using it as an identifier could further prove that point.

Also, rel="canonical" is widely used on the Web today.