Publishing WG Telco, 2017-12-04: Votes on FPWD transitions, PWP issues

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

Voting on FPWD transitions

The Working Group has formally voted to publish two documents, namely

• Web Publications
• Locators for Web Publications

as First Public Working Drafts (FPWD), provided the W3C Director gives his approval. The transition request should happen before Xmas, with an expected publication date on the 4th of January, 2018.

PWP Issues

Issue 9 (definition of a PWP)

The issue discussion (on GitHub) has led to the proposed definition:

A Web Publication that has been packaged into a single information resource, enabling it to be transported and stored independent of any specific address or protocol. A Packaged Web Publication is typically constructed from a published Web Publication (i.e., one that has a specific URL and is accessible via HTTP), but this is not a requirement. Similarly, it is possible to unpack a Packaged Web Publication and publish it as a Web Publication, although there are practical limitations to this (e.g., re-publishing cross-domain resources will require access to all the domains).

The WG approved this definition (for the purpose of a FPWD, i.e., it may still change)

Issue 6 (extra requirements on PWP)

The issue discussion (on GitHub) has proposed the following requirements:

• MUST contain a WP manifest at a well-known location (e.g. manifest.json)
• MUST contain all resources that are part of the publication (reading order + secondary resources)
• MAY contain additional resources that are referenced by the publication (for example a metadata record in a different format)
• MAY contain the request & response HTTP payloads for each resource

The group adopted these (for the purpose of a FPWD), but there were some disagreements on the 4th item. It has been agreed to note (and refer to from the document) in a separate issue (Issue 14), but this should not stop the publication of a FPWD.

The plan is to vote for a FPWD in the coming weeks, so that the PWP document could be published alongside the WP and the Locator drafts.