- From: David Carlisle <davidc@nag.co.uk>
- Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 17:15:26 +0000
- To: Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com>
- CC: liam@w3.org, Noah Mendelsohn <nrm@arcanedomain.com>, "Martin J." <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>, Jim Melton <jim.melton@oracle.com>, Bert Bos <bert@w3.org>, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>, chairs@w3.org, "spec-prod@w3.org" <spec-prod@w3.org>
On 24/12/2011 10:37, Marcos Caceres wrote: > But for cases where it does not break backwards compatibility, then I > should be able to have it. There are many other reasons than backward compatibility for wanting to refer to a versioned spec. Xpath2 (and soon 3) are to a large degree compatible with 1, but they are also considerably larger languages and many developers (notably browser implementations) have chosen to stay at version 1. It would be utterly confusing if references to xpath in DOM API silently updated to refer to xpath3, if implementations are all at 1. This is the _normal_ case. A references section should record the document that was referenced in making the spec, not some future document that happens to have the same name. Exceptions can be made if it is some general informative reference like referencing the word "unicode" to the lasted version of the Unicode spec in a specification that hasn't got dependencies on any particular Unicode version. Another example is EPUB, where EPUB2 references HTML4/XHTML1 and EPUB3 references HTML5, It would not have been useful for EPUB to reference an HTML "living standard" as EPUB readers don't (necessarily) move on and acquire new features just because the html spec has been developed in intervening years. David
Received on Saturday, 24 December 2011 17:15:52 UTC