Re: [xml-dev] In praise of ... PDF or ....

[Gareth Oakes <goakes@gpsl.co>]

Hi Ian,

On 16-Oct-16 2:21 AM, Dave Pawson wrote:
> Jon Udell on managing document sets.
>
> https://blog.jonudell.net/2016/10/15/from-pdf-to-pwp-a-vision-for-compound-web-documents/

On 18/10/2016, 00:43, "Ian Graham" <ian.graham@utoronto.ca> wrote:
>    This issue has been around for 20+ years ....  another packaging and 
>    distribution model will not solve it. The challenge is with users and 
>    the tools / front ends they use, and expectations they have - not in 
>    underlying technology.

I agree, this is not a technology problem, and TBH I don’t think the Udell article does any justice to PWP. What I find interesting about PWP is the idea that the tools/front-ends of users will already contain the PWP technology. PWP is intended to be a web technology that is rolled into, and natively supported by, all web browsers. If they can pull that off, it will become a more compelling initiative.  

One interesting use-case that is already attempting to reuse PWP is ScholarlyHTML. Today, the majority of primary scholarly research is produced and distributed as PDF. There are a lot of “fill the gap” solutions (ReadCube, Slideshare, etc.) but none of them really let the end user build their own reference library (which seems to be what researchers desire, and is a key driver of PDF). Acknowledging that need and supporting it through web standards seems sensible to me.

I think we’re off-topic of XML here but I find this interesting and somewhat related.

Regards,

// Gareth Oakes
// Chief Architect, GPSL
// www.gpsl.co