This specification defines digital publishing based on a fully native representation of documents within the Open Web Platform: Web Publications work both online and offline and can be packaged and made portable.
For millenia now, the written word has been the primary means of encoding and sharing ideas and information. The publication as a bounded edition, made public, has been used to carry intellectual and artistic works of innumerable form: novels, plays, poetry, journals, magazines, newspapers, articles, laws, treatises, pamphlets, atlases, comics, manga, notebooks, memos, manuals, and albums of all sorts.
More recently, with the advent of the information age, print has been ceding ground to digital, and the Web has become a major forum for the public dissemination of ideas. But the Web is unbounded: information and resources are only loosely connected through hyperlinks. While this model has helped the Web thrive in many areas, it has proven problematic for traditional information publishing—users often cannot access works in their entirety, especially when offline, and have not been able to easily access, compile and download content for curation and personal use. That, in turn, has fed the continuing development of non-Web document formats to redress these problems, and made it necessary to create both Web-ready content and alternative offline renditions to ensure publications are fully available.
This specification aims to reduce these barriers and reinvigorate publishing by combining the best aspects of both models—the persistent availability and portability of bounded publications with the pervasive accessibility, addressability, and interconnectedness of the Open Web Platform.
This specification only defines requirements for the production and rendering of valid Web Publications. As much as possible, it leverages existing Open Web Platform technologies to achieve its goal—that being to allow for a measure of boundedness on the Web without changing the way that the Web itself operates.
Moreover, the specification is designed to adapt automatically to updates to Open Web Platform technologies in order to ensure that Web Publications continue to interoperate seamlessly as the Web evolves (e.g., by referencing the latest published versions instead of specific versions).
Further, this specification does not attempt to constrain the nature of a Web Publication: any type of work that can be represented on the Web constitutes a potential Web Publication.
This section was adapted from the Interest Group document as an initial placeholder. The actual makeup of Web Publications may change significantly as development progresses. The section will be updated as features and functionality are formalized.
The act of publishing involves obtaining resources, organizing them into a publication and making that publication available on a Web server. In doing so, the publisher establishes the interconnectedness that binds the resources into a single work. This process also provides an origin for the Web Publication and a URL that uniquely identifies it, giving provenance to the work.
The establishment of this discoverable and identifiable collection is what enables users to access their content without concern for whether they are online or offline. The user agent can cache the resources ensuring that the Web Publication is available and functional while offline, providing the user, as much as possible, a seamless experience interacting with a Web Publication regardless of their network connection.
The Web Publication introduces the concept of a manifest, which serves to carry information about the constituent resources of the publication. The manifest includes metadata that describes the publication as a whole, as it has an identity and nature beyond its constituent resources. The metadata and manifest also incorporate information about the sequence and presentation of the content.
A Web Publication also provides a default ordering of its primary constituent resources, although that order may be changed by user interaction or scripting. The user is able to access any primary resource directly via navigation provided by the publication itself or via the user agent.