Publishing WG Telco, 2018-01-08: Manifest encoding, prototypes, sync media

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

The group began the new year by publishing the First Public Working Drafts for WP, PWP, and Annotation extensions… A general outreach to the community should now be set up on the basis of these documents.

Manifest encoding

Hadrien Gardeur has made some early experimentations/prototypes in encoding the information set in JSON. Two experiments were done:

1. Manifest as an extension of the Web Application Manifest, a.k.a. WAM (see Issue 118)
2. Manifest cast into the the syntax defined by the Readium consortium’s Web Publication Manifest, a.k.a. RWPM (see Issue 119)

In both cases, a "Minimal Viable Manifest" have also been defined.

The general impressionn on #1 is that there is very little, in terms of terms, that a manifest can reuse from WAM, apart from a general encoding style. Most of the terms have to be defined for WP-s from scratch, and even some structures (like a general formulation for links) have to be defined. As was expected, the match with RWPM is way better. The question is, rather, whether the "additional" features of the WAM, in terms of installation, life cycle, security considerations, etc, can be reused as part of a WP implementation in, e.g., a browser. Extending a WAM would probably be beneficial only it that context.

This leads to the issue of WP implementation strategies...

Experimentations, prototypes

The WAM vs. RWPM, as well as all the other features mean that we need some experimentations in terms of implementations. There are a number of implementations that are based on RWPM (Readium 2 itself, but also epub.js, for example, or a tool developed at the NYPL). Atypon’s implementation is also based on Readium. We may have an experimental setup available from Norton.

At this point the group does not need full-blown implementations but, rather, prototypes that help us in setting the right decisions in technical issues like the relationship vs. WAM, the requirements regarding offlining, etc. The goal will be, therefore, to collect at these prototypes and analyze them asap.

Synchronized Media

As a followup of the discussion at TPAC on Media Overlays Marisa DeMeglio has set up a Synchronized Media Community Group to work on that subject separately. Join, if you are interested!

The group decided not to hold a telco next week, due to Martin Luther Kind day in the USA.