Publishing WG Telco, 2017-12-11: PWP FPWD transitions, Locators revisited

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

Voting on FPWD transition for PWP

The Working Group has formally voted to publish the Packaged Web Publications draft 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.

There were some discussions preceding the vote in view of the fact that the document is pretty much a skeleton (although the final document is not expected to be long). Indeed, at this moment it is pretty much impossible to make a decision on which packaging format the group would refer to; the path to a Web Packaging is still not clear. The group does not intend to develop a packaging spec on its own, which means that it has to wait until the situation becomes clearer. However, the document does include statements on conformance, on the definition of PWP, etc, that are independent of the details of the packaging format and, to get those issues out in the open, the FPWD does make sense. This led to the final vote.

Revisiting the Locator FPWD

Although the WG has decided on it meeting of the 4th of December to publish the FPWD for the Locator document, new discussions started on the mailing list (see the message starting the thread, but also the response of Tzviya Siegman). One issue that did come to the fore is that the previous version of the document editorially mixed up the features that the group “inherited” from the Web Annotation Model and those that are normatively developed by this group. It was decided to adopt a much more restrictive document that concentrates on the new issues only.

In the course of the discussion the name “Locator” was also criticized as not appropriate for the content. There is currently an open issue to see if a new name can be found.