w3process-ISSUE-155 (Errata Access in RECs): Errata access from TR page [Process Document]

w3process-ISSUE-155 (Errata Access in RECs): Errata access from TR page [Process Document]

http://www.w3.org/community/w3process/track/issues/155

Raised by: Steve Zilles
On product: Process Document

This issue arose because, in the original discussion of Issue-141 Errata Management [0], some of the commenters (and, in particular, Fantasai [1]) noted that people (whether users or developers or implementers) were going to the REC (via the TR pages) and getting out of date information. 

[0] http://www.w3.org/community/w3process/track/issues/141
[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-w3process/2014Oct/0139.html 

The goal of these commenters was to attempt to insure that people accessing RECs would be aware that there might be more current information which, although not yet normative, was better than that in the REC. 

Some people have argued that RECs should stay as they are and that such updated information should be in a separate document which itself might take a number of forms, ranging from an auto-generated errata/issues/bugs list to a draft of the REC which has the Errata text in situ.  There seems to be little disagreement that a separate document can be used. The disagreement seems to be whether the REC document can, itself, have better indications as to what the errata are and what changes are proposed to correct the errata. 

The November proposal [2] allowed the REC to be updated in place provided that a reader could recover, say by a style sheet change or some other mechanism, the original text of the Normative REC. Recent commenters seem to believe that this would be a bad thing for the W3C to do although in practice this may be little different from having a separate draft with the errata.

[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-w3process/2014Nov/0121.html

The goal of this issue is to find solutions associating a REC and its Errata that both (1) make it easy and natural for someone retrieving the REC document to find the most up-to-date document (including Errata) and (2) preserve the necessary permanence of a REC. (Here, “necessary permanence” is intended to mean what the community thinks is necessary to insure is preserved; we already allow updates to things like broken links in place so permanence does not mean bit by bit fidelity.)

Received on Saturday, 7 February 2015 23:06:48 UTC