Re: References Re: What are the requirements/problems? Re: Working on New Styles for W3C Specifications

   




On Thursday, 1 December 2011 at 19:44, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

> On Thu, 01 Dec 2011 18:19:27 +0100, Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com (mailto:w3c@marcosc.com)> wrote:
>  
> > 4. Do we really still need a bibliography when we use hypertext and in  
> > the age of living standards?
> >  
>  
>  
>  
> Yep.
>  
> > How do people actually use bibliographies in the age of HTML (i.e., do
> > people care when something was published, who published it, etc. andwhy  
> > or why not?)?
> >  
>  
> Its primary use is in printed versions, with a strong secondary use in  
> documents about the spec. In both those cases there is still quite a lot  
> of usage of the kinds of information you mentioned. Given that it is  
> common to refer to a document by a title and someone who put the words  
> there, the author or editor's name(s) are important in many cases,  
> although it would work to say that a document was produced by "W3C's  
> WigwamForAGossesBridle Working Group" - or even "W3C" for documents which  
> are published with consensus.
>  

  
> > Can't we just do away with bibliographies and just cross link to
> > specifications.
> >  
>  
>  
>  
> Not in a printed version,  
I still would like to see what this means. In practice, trying to "use" a printed spec is hard (it's not really searchable, and you can't really find what terms means because they are defined throughout a specification).     
> and since printing from the web is still a bit  
> arcane that probably means we need it in the standard published version.  
> Since we MUST have it for when people print,
>  

It would be good to know how often that happens too (and why?). Anyone that has worked with me knows I print all specs like crazy and can't read long documents from screen. However, I only print specs to review them with a red pen… not to work from (specs I use every day are bookmarked for easy access).  
> we don't get to save much  
> work by cutting it out of online versions.
>  

I agree, particularly with everything Julian said in responding to this thread. I think the right thing to do is to do both: include references separated by normative and informative, but I still don't see any use case for including the author, date, or organization that produced the document.    
> That said we could do smarter things than making people go via the  
> references section to follow a link - a style like
>  
> ...in the case where _FudgeAPI stickiness_ [FUDGE] is used ...
>  
> would probably be more helpful in an HTML document online.
>  
> IMHO
>  
> chaals
>  
> --  
> Charles 'chaals' McCathieNevile Opera Software, Standards Group
> je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg kan litt norsk
> http://my.opera.com/chaals Try Opera: http://www.opera.com
>

Received on Monday, 12 December 2011 20:14:56 UTC