Publishing WG Telco, 2019-02-04: Primary entry page, or not, in a package

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

Apart from admin issues and some publishing plans the whole meeting concentrated on Issue # on the packaging part: is it necessary to add a Primary Entry Page to a package or not. A consensus proposal was put forward prior to the meeting, summarized at the meeting by:

Either the HTML entry page or the separate JSON-LD Manifest MUST be in the package. It is not required to have both, though. The user agent MUST first look for the entry page with the name index.html if found, it MUST follow the rules as described in the WP spec to extract the Web Publication Manifest; otherwise, the user agent looks for the Web Publication Manifest with the name manifest.json to extract the Web Publication Manifest.

This resulted in a long and, so far, inconclusive discussion. The consensus proposal was based on practical considerations, providing some sort of a freedom for publishers to decide whether their publication is aimed at residing on the Web or not and avoid unnecessary content if the goal is the latter. The main opposition to this proposal came from the fact that this optionality of the Primary Entry Page would create some sort of a bifurcation between a Web oriented publication and the packages, and that would be detrimental. It was also emphasized that "optionality" is always a source of problems in practice.

At this moment no consensus has been reached; discussions to follow.