Re: my action item on issue 52 (Sort 1.3 Terminology)

Henrik Nordstrom wrote:
> fre 2007-06-15 klockan 14:37 +0200 skrev Julian Reschke:
> ...
>> (2) In the RFC2616 ordering, things that belong together (such as 
>> "client", "user agent", "server" ...) are close to each other.
> 
> Sure, but also makes a specific definition quite hard to find without
> searching for it.

But then, this is a problem for the plain text format of RFCs in 
general. Personally, I haven't looked at a text version when an HTML 
version was around for years (well, except for LC).

> It's a definition of terms, not a description of operations.

Yes, but it's sitting in a section called "Introduction", not 
"Glossary". There's a reason for the order the terms are in.

I don't say that having alphabetical ordering wouldn't be nice as well, 
but I'm not convinced that it's the right thing to do it *there*. Thus I 
would argue that unless there's strong consensus for a change, we 
shouldn't fix what's not broken.

>> (3) Contrary to RFC2616, the text version of new spec will contain an 
>> alphabetical index section anyway (unless it's removed upon publication :-).
> 
> Which works well for an HTML version, but not so well in the authorative
> ascii version..
> 
> In other words I am for having the terminology definitions sorted
> alphabetically. If there is need for relation between the terms outside
> what is said elsewhere in the text then I propose to expand the terms as
> needed. Some references to the main text may be in place.

I'd argue that if an alphabetical glossary is needed, it should go into 
an appendix. That's additional spec text, but it could be generated 
automatically.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Saturday, 16 June 2007 08:27:34 UTC