Re: deleting w3c-test.org/{webapps,webevents,web-platform-tests} creates lots of 404s

Hi Art,

On 20/03/2014 18:08 , Arthur Barstow wrote:
> What's the story here, Cool URIs and such?

I'm sorry for the 404s we created for you, and I understand Cool URLs 
and all, but the WPT is a software project, not a document tree. Files 
will move around.

Some of the breakage you have seen is far more extensive than I expect 
it to be in future, that's teething pains and all. But we have to expect 
that even now that we have stabilising naming schemes and all, there 
will be cases in which some things will get refactored one way or 
another over time. It's unlikely to ever break all the links to tests 
from a given WG, but it's going to break links to individual files.

So my question is: what are the primary use cases in which such 
reference will be used and might break? Maybe we can scare up ways of at 
least minimising damage over time.

You list two:

   • A spec referencing its TS. As I said, I doubt that we'll break that 
sort of root link again. Just in case, for this we can use the 404 
handler idea I mentioned, or simply edit the documents (I would argue 
that this is a case where you should be granted an edit in place).

   • The implementation report. That might be a bit trickier because I 
understand why you'd want to reference files, just as I understand why a 
year later someone might need to move those files around. I'm not sure 
how to handle this. The simplest option if for IRs to have a warning at 
the top stating that they were built from WPT commit deadb33f and links 
might go stale — whoever wishes to reproduce the same situation can do 
so by checking out the repo and reverting to that commit. There are 
other options but they're pretty heavy-handed so I'd rather not mention 
them yet.

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Friday, 21 March 2014 11:03:26 UTC