Re: [ReSpec] dated versions of works in progress

On 18 May 2010, at 8:22 AM, Dan Connolly wrote:

> On Tue, 2010-05-18 at 11:45 +0200, Robin Berjon wrote:
>> On May 17, 2010, at 16:06 , Dan Connolly wrote:
>>> I think I saw, in the ReSpec source code, its own bibliography
>>> of W3C specs. Why is that?
>>>
>>> Does the bibliography generator not suffice for some reason?
>>> http://www.w3.org/2002/01/tr-automation/tr-biblio-ui
>>
>> Well, the primary reason is that, as usual, tools are perfectly  
>> well hidden deep inside dated space so that they can't ever be  
>> found :)
>
> It is indeed frustrating that the recent redesign clipped some
> links/paths from the tech reports page to the tool,
> but I don't think "dated space" has much to do with findability.

I think those tools are linked now from the "About W3C Standards" page:
  http://www.w3.org/standards/about

   Ian

>
> It's the top search hit for "bibliography generator" on our site
> (or "w3c bibliography generator" on your favorite search engine).
> That does require knowing it exists. That search tells
> me it's linked from the standards faq.
>  http://www.w3.org/standards/faq
>
> I'd expect typical readers of this mailing list to know about it,
> though, since it's discussed here from time to time and
> one of the tools linked from the archive cover page.
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/spec-prod/#tools
> (though it's called "extractor" rather than "generator"
> there, which doesn't help people remember how to search
> for it.)
>
>> That being said, I don't get the impression that it would address  
>> the needs that ReSpec has.
>> The idea of references in ReSpec is that you just mention [[DAHUT]]  
>> in the body of the text,
>> and it will automatically insert an entry in the references  
>> section, and make that text a link.
>> So it needs a label to biblio entry mapping which it doesn't look  
>> like tr-biblio-ui provides.
>> I guess we could have a label to URI mapping and call to this tool,
>
> I wonder if the shortnames would serve for the [[DAHUT]] label; if so,
> you could skip the mapping table.
>
>> but that would only work
>> while online — I want ReSpec to as much as possible work
>> completely offline (e.g. on the plane)
>> and from the local file system (the only exception
>> being the TR CSS which can't be loaded that way).
>
> I think the bibliography generator is just one XSLT script
> plus a copy of tr.rtf... but I suppose getting it running
> locally is a bit fidgety, compared to just some javascript code.
>
> I'm sure we could provide a JSON version of tr.rdf. I wonder
> if that would help.
>
>> Also, the ReSpec bib DB (which was pilfered from Bert's CSS spec  
>> generation
>> tool) has a lot of references that aren't W3C specifications.
>
> Maintaining that sort of thing by hand gives me the willies.
> Oh well... different strokes, I guess.
>
>> By the way it looks like there's a small bug in the tool. If it  
>> doesn't recognise an URI you get:
> [...]
>> Which isn't the best response, some indication of error would  
>> probably be
>> more helpful for any tool chained behind this one.
>
> Yeah... so far, nobody has been bothered enough to fix that.
>
>> Thanks for the pointer!
>
> Sure.
>
> -- 
> Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
> gpg D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E
>
>
>

--
Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org)    http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs/
Tel:                                      +1 718 260 9447

Received on Tuesday, 18 May 2010 13:34:47 UTC