UFDTF - on stale docs

When I joined RDF Core WG, a long time ago, an issue was that there were 
some poorly maintained Web pages concerning RDF in W3C space.

These would neither:
- up to date
or
- clearly frozen

This gave rise to confusion, at what appeared to be an up-to-date list 
of say RDF parsers, included ones that had not been maintained for 
yonks, and did not include new ones that did exist.

It seems to me that pages describing standards technology should be one 
or the other.

IANA provides a mechanism, for IETF standards, to ensure that various 
information is up to date.

The W3C does not have a comparable mechanism.

Hence, at that time, I was convinced that the best we could do (given 
the implausibility of W3C committing resources for five or ten years 
from now, for maintaining content), was to create documents that would 
be frozen - and hence, to some extent go stale.

Clearly some of the examples in say, the RDF Primer, are less pertinent 
now than we might have hoped when they were written. The more formal 
documents of course are less struck with this problem.

It might be argued that Wiki's provide for a mechanism by which 
up-to-date information can be provided, with significantly less overhead 
from W3C. I am less than convinced, but could be persuaded to use such 
an approach for WG output that is most likely to go stale.

Jeremy

Received on Friday, 9 November 2007 14:40:20 UTC