DPUB IG Telco, 2015-11-23: PWP Locator task force, planning on PWP Work

See minutes online for a more detailed record of the discussions. (The headers below link into the relevant sections of the minutes.)

PWP Locator Task Force

Following the discussions on PWP identifiers last week a task force has been set up, led by Bill Kasdorff. There were some discussions on the call as for the goals of the task force (this has to be cleaned up), but the general ideas are:

• The task force should concentrate on locators (as opposed to identifiers) both for the PWP level as well as on the individual resources’ level ** I.e., dealing with identifiers (ISBN-s of different sort, ISTC work, DOI-s, etc) is out of scope, as well as the issues around fragment identifiers, hence also the name of the task force
• The task force should dig into the addressing/identifier work described in the PWP document, should flesh out the details, possibly have some mock-up implementation, and identify if and what of this work would require a targeted Recommendation/Standardization work (either at W3C, or at IDPF, or in a joint group)
• The task force should also provide input to the IDPF EPUB3.1 work, which is looking at a “browser friendly manifestation” of EPUB. The goal of EPUB3.1 work, in this respect, would be to be forward compatible with an eventual PWP work

There were also some technical discussion, emphasizing the fact that a PWP can be a collection of very different resources from all over the place, where the order of the resource access (reading) can be different from one PWP to the other even if they share resources. The locator structure should make this possible (e.g., via a manifest).

Planning PWP Work

There is a need for a more generic planning on where the PWP work ought to be going. The terminology-state-identifier-locator discussion has resulted in a more stable bases, and the task force on locators will dig into the details. What else? Ideas that came up:

• Looking at the library and archiving community. A focussed work will be pursued to see what specific needs that community may have and whether what is in the PWP document is adequate or not, whether it has to be extended, etc.
• The presentation control issue needs further work
• Other issues listed in the PWP draft should also be checked.
• Some sort of a proof-of-concept implementation is necessary to identify the necessary missing bits

For the last issue: Dave Cramer has recently created a simple mock-up based on the earlier discussion with, and work of Jake Archibald. (The repo of Dave is also available for cloning.) This is a tremendous start, and it has been agreed that Dave would give a more detailed overview on what is happening there on one of the next calls.

Miscellaneous

The Interest Group has agreed to publish the next version of the PWP document as a formal Interest Group Draft. Should be out on Thursday the 26th.

The group has been reminded on the need of having better CSS examples, and some further ideas did come up.