Publishing WG Telco, 2017-08-07: publ changes, terms, identifiers, minimum manifest

Publishing WG Telco, 2017-08-07: publ changes, terms, identifiers, minimum manifest

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

Can a publication change over time?

There was a long email discussion on what the WG should/could do with this problem. Based on an earlier proposal on mail the group agreed that this problem cannot really be controlled by the WP's, it is a generic Web feature/problem.

Working definitions from Publishing and Linking

The group recognized that a number of definitions are properly defined in a separate Working Group note “Publishing and Linking”. It was decided to reuse these definitions, whenever appropriate, instead of re-defining the same terms.

Identifiers and Locators

A Pull request has been proposed by Tim Cole, Benjamin Young and Bill Kasdorf. The essential point of the proposal is to strictly separate the term “identifier”, with its own definition, and with the requirement that a WP SHOULD (but not MUST) have at least one identifier. It is recognized that, by virtue of being on the Web, a WP does have a locator, but that has a different role. Also, an identifier is defined in such a way that it MUST be possible to convert it into a locator that, through some mechanism, should provide an access to the manifest of a WP.

The WG agreed to merge that pull request, with the understanding that minor editorial changes would still happen.

Minimum Viable Manifest

A proposal was put forward a while ago, refined right before the call. The group has not yet found an agreement; issues discussed were:

• should it be required to have a “title“
• should the list of constituent resources include secondary resources as well

The discussion is ongoing on GitHub.