BpDF principle of graceful degradation in PMC pipelines

[castedo]

A high-level goal for BpDF (Baseprint Document Format) is reducing format rot (for long-term preservation/availability). Aligning closely to JATS XML archived in the PubMed Central Open Access Subset is part of the current BpDF strategy to minimize format rot. BpDF should be easily transformable (via XSLT for instance) into XML that can be read by software that can read arbitrary archived PMC JATS XML.

However, this transformation is not expected to be perfect or high-fidelity. PMC software is intended to read JATS XML deposited by established institutions, like journal publishers, and not self-publishing Baseprint authors. Conversely, the primary software for reading BpDF is BpDF-compatible software, not PMC software.

The principle of graceful degradation is appropriate here. Applied to BpDF it means it's OK if PMC-based readers have "graceful degradation" when rendering a webpage from Baseprint JATS XML transformed via XSLT into PMC-friendly JATS XML.

[castedo]

If BpDF edition 2 proceeds with proposal #16 and #18 then this principle of graceful degradation in PMC pipelines will not longer be followed.