publishing FPWD issue (was Re: Thursday telcon & agenda)

On Wed, Jan 16, 2002, Lofton Henderson wrote:
> QA Working Group,
> Brief agenda:
> =====
> 	3b. Review revised FPWD plan


We've decided to publish, soon, the 2 first parts of the framework in
our QA web space, using the usual scheme, i.e "dated versions" and
"latest version", with redirects from "latest" to "dated" version.
AFAIK, there's the plan.

latest : /QA/WG/qaframe-part(.html)
redirects to dated : /QA/WG/YYYY/framework-YYYYMMDD/qaframe-part(.html)

That's OK for group drafts, *but*.


But, since our goal is to publish an official "first public working
draft" in the Technical Reports track, we'll have to move our
documents to TR space, and follow TR rules, especially for naming.

the TR guide [1] is not authoritative on this matter, but the usual
practice is to have :

In the case of a multiple-part document:

http://www.w3.org/TR/shortname/part(.html)
points to 
http://www.w3.org/TR/YYYY/STATUS-shortname-date/part(.html)


But in the case of a family of documents, each part has its shortname:
http://www.w3.org/TR/shortname-part/(Overview.html)
points to
http://www.w3.org/TR/YYYY/STATUS-shortname-part-date/(Overview.html)


We usually think of our framework as a "family" of documents, but our
"file approach" for WG drafts is a "multipart documents" approach.

In order to help the discussion on this topic (provided that the WG
thinks it is worth discussing), here are a few ideas to take into
consideration:


* We can still call the framework a "family of documents" and think of
it as is, never mind whether we choose the "multipart document" or
"family" approach.

* if we choose the "multipart document" approach, we'll have to
re-publish all parts each time we want to make a new publication. (but
they don't need to have changed, we can republish the 4 parts with only
one having changed)

* if we go with the "multipart document" approach, we will have to
publish them with a "cover page", i.e:
http://www.w3.org/TR/YYYY/STATUS-shortname-date/Overview(.html)
http://www.w3.org/TR/YYYY/STATUS-shortname-date/Intro(.html)
http://www.w3.org/TR/YYYY/STATUS-shortname-date/ops(.html)

* we can do without a cover page if we think the intro is enough

* if we go with the "multipart" option, the status of the document is
global. This has good and bad consequences.

* if we choose the "family" approach, we'll need authorizations from the
director each time and for each part (shortnames and all, see
publication rules [2]) 

* if we choose the "family" approach, we may have trouble linking
through dated documents. No problem if we always link to (fragments of)
latest versions of the other documents. linking to (fragments of) dated
versions of other documents might be a bit painful.


"Historically", working groups (CSS, DOM) have chosen the "family"
approach. What will we choose?


Hope this helps and is of any interest.

[1] http://www.w3.org/Guide/Reports
[2] http://www.w3.org/Guide/pubrules

-- 
Olivier

Received on Thursday, 17 January 2002 00:24:51 UTC