Re: what formats count as primary resources?

What Hadrien said.

Make the discovery link optional but strongly recommended. Authors of publications where all of the primary resources are non-HTML files can use entry HTML files (i.e. ones that contain a discovery link to the manifest, however that ends up being formatted) for linking to the publication and skip Link headers on the primary resources if providing them is too onerous.

I also think that providing those headers will not be a problem for most cases, e.g. where all the resources come from the same server, belong to a single publication, and the server software can either parse the manifest or is actually managing the authorship of the publication in the first place. Most web sites are authored with CMSes. A publication-aware CMS should make all of this easy. 

- best
- Baldur Bjarnason
  baldur@rebus.foundation



> On 28 Jul 2017, at 07:57, Hadrien Gardeur <hadrien.gardeur@feedbooks.com> wrote:
> 
> In Readium-2 we decided that universality is the right choice. As it's been pointed out, audiobooks and comics are legitimate use case and having an HTML wrapper is a burden, not a useful thing to have.
> 
> > if we require that each primary resource has a link to a manifest, and that we don't want to rely on HTTP headers, that rules out images, audio, or video
> 
> That's one of the reason why I'm against requiring a link. It's also problematic for many other reasons including:
>  • the ability to re-use the same resource in a large number of publications
>  • creating a Web Publication with resources that you can't modify
>  • it forces links to be both ways, which is never a requirement on the Web
>  • other specifications (Web App Manifest, RSS, Atom) let the content creator decide if and when discovery is available, it's never a MUST, especially on all resources
> I think that discovery should extend to HTTP and the Link header, but there are also many situations where the author won't be able to change the HTTP response headers for a given resource (this usually requires having a Web App or changing the configuration of the server, none of which are compatible with what we're building IMO).

Received on Friday, 28 July 2017 12:09:12 UTC