Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] Proliferation of manifests at W3C (#423)

The W3C Publishing WG did grab this issue before and its conclusion was that the relationship between a Web Application and a Web Publication is an "association": a reading application is able to read multiple publications and a publication can be loaded by multiple apps. A publisher does not want to publish an application with each publication he releases. A user will install a preferred app (maybe a highly accessible app), then use it to import many publications (usually organized as a "bookshelf" inside the app). Some reading customizations are made at the level of the app (e.g. dark mode), others at the level of a specific publication (e.g. font size). 

Therefore, even if Web Application Manifest and Publication Manifest share a lot (both are expressed in JSON-LD, the processing model for obtaining a publication manifest is a sibling of the web app manifest process etc.), conflating the two concepts would end up in creating a weird aggregation of properties that would not make web developers happier.

What SHOULD certainly converge between different JSON-LD based manifests is i18n plumbing -> e.g. the use of "dir" and "lang" for property values in the Web App Manifest vs @direction and @language in the Publication Manifest. 

Ah, also, the Audio Book Manifest is simply a specialization of the more generic Publication Manifest (an Audio Book IS a Publication), which goes in the direction of the initial comment of this issue. 


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