Re: finding newer versions of W3C Technical Reports [was: trivial question about SPARQL]

At 05:27 PM 1/25/2008 +0700, editor@content-wire.com wrote:
>I think I am looking at too many documents at once at any given time
>had not seen the link to the new version, I knew it had to be somewhere
>
>I am finding it really difficult to find the uptodate docs on the site, ...

All formally-published W3C Technical Reports are required to
have a title page that contains this information.   We do regularly
discuss (internally within the Staff) our practices for these fields.
We (I personally and on behalf of Ian Jacobs, our Head of
Communications) would be interested in feedback on the usability
-- or lack thereof -- of the current Technical Report title page content.

Specifically, every Technical Report is required to specify on its
title page (1) a URI that will return exactly the content of the specific
version of the document as it was originally published for all time
in the future, (2) a URI that will return the "latest version" of a
document describing the work, and (3) a URI that will return
the preceding version of the Technical Report if one existed.

Our Technical Report title page format calls these 3 URIs respectively:

1. This Version
2. Latest Version
3. Previous Version

>is there a way of flagging the
>outdated stuff more prominently (put them in a liked category superseded_by comes to mind) or somethign

The W3C Technical Reports index [1] lists (only) the most recent
version of each published Technical Report.

  [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/

If you are asking whether we could revise the _content_ of an
older version once an update has been published, that's a debate
we had a long time ago and the conclusion has been that no, once
the "This Version" URI has been given to a document the only
changes we will make to the content at that "This Version" URI
(called "in-place changes") are to fix markup errors and -- very
occasionally -- broken links.  That policy has been interpreted
as precluding any other change that would cause differences
in the rendered (e.g. hardcopy) document.

Note that some documents on the W3C site may appear in the
same style as a W3C Technical Report but are not TRs and may
not consistently apply the conventions used for TRs.  [1] is the
definitive list of W3C Technical Reports.

Received on Friday, 25 January 2008 15:47:36 UTC