Re: Biblio references and authors Re: RfC: LCWD of Web Socket API; comment deadline October 21

On Friday, September 30, 2011 at 11:45 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:

> On 2011-09-30 10:37, Marcos Caceres wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > On Friday, September 30, 2011 at 10:26 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
> > 
> > > On 2011-09-29 18:28, Arthur Barstow wrote:
> > > > On September 29, aLCWD of Web Sockets API was published:
> > > > 
> > > > http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-websockets-20110929/
> > > > 
> > > > Please send all comments to public-webapps@w3.org (mailto:public-webapps@w3.org) by October 21.
> > > 
> > > The reference for the Websocket Protocol (WSP) needs an updated author list.
> > Might be good if we stop including the name of authors in the references (because they do tend to change quite a bit over time). The reference document is hyperlinked, so what is the use case for including the author in a reference? I only see (very limited) value in stating if something is a work in progress, and the name of the organization that produced the document.
> 
> Well, I think it's a matter of good style to actually cite properly. (I 
> guess some value of "properly" should be defined for W3C specs). YMMV.
All that matters is being able to get to the spec you are referencing - and for that all you need is a hyperlink. Everything else is pointless fluff, AFAICT. Names, dates, etc. is just a carry over from the pre-Web dark ages, where you actually needed to know who wrote the document so you could search in database to find the printed version in some physical library. None of the specs we reference are on printed on dead organic material, so lets cast away this silly archaic practice of including authors. 

Received on Friday, 30 September 2011 09:56:34 UTC