I18N-ISSUE-355: Supporting files referenced rather than copied [Encoding DOC]

I18N-ISSUE-355: Supporting files referenced rather  than copied [Encoding DOC]

http://www.w3.org/International/track/issues/355

Raised by: Richard Ishida
On product: Encoding DOC

From: Martin Dürst
Location: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-international/2014AprJun/0203.html

Status: Unreviewed

Comment:
Dear I18N WG,

This is a last call comment on the Encoding spec (http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-encoding-20140603/).

In the "Status of this Document", it claims the following:

"This is a snapshot of the editor's document, as of the date shown on the title page, .... The primary reason that W3C is publishing this document is so that HTML5 and other specifications may normatively refer to a stable W3C Recommendation."

Unlike most other (W3C) specs, the Encoding spec requires a lot of supplementary data (see e.g. the 'index-...' links at http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-encoding-20140603/#legacy-single-byte-encodings and elsewhere). However, all this supplementary data seems to be provided by links to the WHATWG version of the spec (e.g. http://encoding.spec.whatwg.org/index-iso-8859-2.txt).

As a result, the goal of "stable W3C Recommendation" will not be achieved because the WHATWG may decide to change any of the 'index-' files at any date if they think this is appropriate.

I can imagine various reasons for the above, among else:
- This was an oversight (-> please fix)
- This was done to save work (-> please work harder
- This was done to be able to pretend that there's a stable
  version but keep as much agility as possible, hoping nobody
  finds out.

Either way, it doesn't work. While it may keep the algorithms stable, it won't keep the data stable. The worst thing would be for the algorithms and the data to get out of sync (simple case: WHATWG decides that it's more straightforward to move an offset constant from the algorithm to the data or vice versa).


Regards,   Martin.

Received on Thursday, 12 June 2014 13:52:50 UTC