Publishing WG Telco, 2017-10-02: Lifecycle, pagination, security

See minutes online for a more detailed record of the discussions.

Lifecycle

Matt Garrish began working on a section for the “lifecycle” of a WP. However… We don’t have a specific user agent in mind, in contrast to the web-app manifest which is focused on browsers. There is also not any one lifecycle for a web publication. If you’re a browser and you’ve loaded a web-app manifest directly, it’s different from what an ebook reading application might do with it. There’s an endless web of scenarios we’d have to flesh out if we wanted to.

Should we focus rather on the data model, and then maybe further down the line try to standardize if things come to that. Then starting to look at more specific issues on how a browser could represent a publication. What are we expecting a browser to do — such as browsing context. What would entail for a web publication to be layered on top of the existing HTML object model experience? There are probably interesting avenues to pursue instead of spending a lot of time specing out a lifecycle.

A PR will be made available along those lines soon.

Pagination, layout

There is a Pull request on github (see also draft version thereof) on pagination. The pull request collects a number of issues, and starts with the assumption that most of what publishing wants should be handled by CSS and, if there are additional features, these should be settled with the CSS WG.

The author of the PR could not be on the call. It was agreed that Dave Cramer will provide some editing on the text and merge it afterwards.

Security, Integrity

Security section was on the agenda, but it could not be provided by the time of the meeting. Nevertheless, a discussion occurred on the notion of integrity (ie, that the WP’s content has not changed) and how to ensure that (probably through the usage of digital signatures). It is not clear whether this issue is relevant for a Packaged WP only, or for WP-s in general.

Misc

• There is a draft agenda for the upcoming TPAC meeting
• Next week’s meeting is cancelled (Frankfurt Book Fair, various holidays in North America)
• A doodle will be provided with choices for a possible F2F meeting in Spring 2018.