Publication Manifest Use Case Requirements Review

This page details how the Publication Manifest specification compares against each of the requirements in the original Web Publications Use Cases and Requirements. Not all use cases are applicable to a manifest, as many were targeted at user agents, packaging, etc.

• Req 1. Make use of OWP features - The manifest is serialized using JSON-LD and is grounded in the schema.org vocabulary, both common web technologies. The use of these technologies is also intended to simplify SEO, as the manifest metadata can be harvested by web crawlers.
• Req 2. Horizontal dependencies - The Publication Manifest specification has passed accessibility, internationalization, and privacy and security reviews.
• Req 3. Escalating trust - N/A.
• Req 4. Identification of publication - The manifest includes a canonical identifier field for uniquely identifying a publication. This identifier should resolve to the publication when the publication is available online.
• Req 5. Identification of resources - The manifest uses a reading order and resources list to identify all the resources that are within the bounds of a publication. A separate links field for non-essential resources is also provided.
• Req 6. Technical and descriptive metadata - The publication manifest defines both a set of descriptive properties (title, creators, publication dates, etc.) and structural metadata (reading order, resources and links) for describing publications.
• Req 7. Resource discoverability and importance - All resources of a publication are easily retrieved from a manifest. The importance of resource is differentiated based on whether they are in the reading order and resource list (necessary for rendering the publication) or in the links section (supplementary).
• Req 8. Default reading order - The reading order defines the author's preferred sequencing of content.
• Req 9. Table of contents - The manifest allows the resource containing the table of contents to be identified through the use of the contents relation. A recommended format for expressing tables of contents in HTML is also provided.
• Req 10. Navigate to time-based locations - N/A.
• Req 11. Random access - Some features described are supported, such as identifying previews and adding labels for resources. Others were never brought into scope - multiple reading orders and language of resources. These could be supported, however.
• Req 12. Print page locations - The manifest allows a page list to be discovered by the rel value pagelist.
• Req 13. Mixed media - The manifest allows publication resources of any type to be defined. It is only at the profile level that restrictions get placed on the content (e.g., audiobooks).
• Req 14. Synchronized media - The manifest is intended to work with output of the synchronized media community group. The addition of the alternate keyword was done for this purpose, for example.
• Req 15. Data resources - The publication manifest does not restrict the types of resources that can be included in a publication.
• Req 16. Access control/write protection - N/A.
• Req 17. Package content as a single file - N/A.
• Req 18. Identify origin of packaged resources - N/A.
• Req 19. Package origin - N/A.
• Req 20. Prevent tampering with package - N/A.
• Req 21. Accessible player interface - N/A.
• Req 22. Skip by segments of time - N/A.
• Req 23. Publication and resource durations - The manifest includes both a general duration property for the overall duration of a publication, and a length property to express the duration of each property.
• Req 24. Save and resume current location - N/A.
• Req 25. Leave and return to position - N/A.
• Req 26. Provide paginated view - N/A.
• Req 27. Offline automatically - N/A.
• Req 28. Offline resources - The manifest provides sufficient information about the resources of a publication to allow a user agent to bring it offline.
• Req 29. Personalize the reading experience - N/A.
• Req 30. Read in vanilla browser - N/A.
• Req 31. Distribution doesn't change publication - N/A.
• Req 32. Distribution compatible with user expectations - N/A.
• Req 33. Discover descriptive metadata - The rel attribute can be used to identify resources that contain metadata records.
• Req 34. Discover changes to resources - To determine if resources have been added or removed, the reading order and resource list of two versions of a manifest can be compared.