Re: End-of-lifing dead documents in /TR/

(created ISSUE-2 for this)

On Wed, 16 Nov 2011 19:43:34 +0100, fantasai  
<fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:

> On 11/16/2011 10:23 AM, Carr, Wayne wrote:
>> There are some drafts people bring up to me time after time that are  
>> dead, but no one knows.  Even if it says something on a WG wiki, if it  
>> isn't in the draft people aren't going to know.
>>
>> One possibility could be if a draft misses it's heartbeat publication  
>> by x months, it automatically gets marked prominently in the status  
>> section as not being currently worked on.

> For auto-marking... I think 3 months is too short. We'd have a lot
> of actively-edited CSS drafts get marked as abandoned that way.
> While some of our modules should be updated and pushed to /TR more
> often than they are, in other cases the draft is just being edited
> in slower cycles and doesn't need to be republished every 3 months.
> A year would be better; the WG should be able to request Unmaintained
> status sooner, but as an automatic thing I think a longer period
> of time is better.

A year seems about right to me for automatic marking.

> For CR-level specs, the period should be even longer (multiple years),
> since in many cases they are not being updated because there are no
> changes to make, only implementations and testcases to build.

I'd rather not allow more than 2 years for something that is still  
supposedly moving forward. Even if the requirement is just to "touch" the  
document.

>> If a draft is waiting for something else there could be a prominent  
>> note in the status section (or even above it) that says what it is  
>> waiting for, with periodic updates that they are still waiting.

yup.

>> If the status isn't being updated, it could be marked dormant and  
>> finally something like withdrawn (and marked in the same way if the WG  
>> decides to drop it).
>
> +1 to having an Unmaintained status. We should also be able to mark
> RECs as Unmaintained. CSS1 and HTML4, for example, are not getting
> errata anymore.

Indeed. But they are historically interesting documents - just throwing  
them away, besides being unlike the way W3C does stuff, strikes me as a  
bad idea.

cheers

-- 
Charles 'chaals' McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg kan litt norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com

Received on Thursday, 24 November 2011 07:17:27 UTC