please correct Status of this Document in Time Editor's Drafts

Feng,

During today's SWBPD meeting I reminded editors to please write
accurate statements in your Status of this Document sections that
reflect the actual status of the document in hand.

Specifically, Editor's Drafts should not claim to be W3C Working
Drafts.  I realize that it is tempting to include the common boilerplate
in anticipation of some future publication on the W3C Technical
Reports page but it is not appropriate to include a boilerplate
claim that a document has a particular maturity level.

Among the problems this causes is that search engines return
pointers to documents that are not what they claim to be.

I took an action in today's meeting to ask you to update the
two documents in isi.edu/~pan to at a minimum change
"W3C Working Draft" to "Editor's Draft" in the SOTD and strike
the entire paragraph "This document is the First Public Working Draft ..".

The document Style for Group-internal Drafts [1] gives further
advice to document editors.

Thanks for agreeing to edit these documents.  That is a valuable
contribution to the community.  It's important to respect these
matters of style as well so readers are not misled about the
state of the work.

   [1] http://www.w3.org/2005/03/28-editor-style.html

-Ralph

Received on Saturday, 5 November 2005 15:01:43 UTC