Re: Spec Guidelines

Hi Dan,

Thanks for your clarifications.

Lest it be lost amidst the details, the main point I wanted to make was:  I 
like the proposal early in this thread, to consolidate the various 
documents and clarify the normative level of the merged bits.  There is a 
wealth of good stuff here, in the 2-3 places.

Further, the procedures are more sensible (IMO) than, for example, the ISO 
rules (under which I worked a lot).  One thing I did like about the ISO 
approach, however, was the "ISO Directives Part 3" --  a bible for ISO 
editors -- which had everything in one place that you'd ever need to know 
to be an ISO editor.

That said, here's a question about a detail, that also illustrates why I 
like the proposal...

Regarding http://www.w3.org/Guide/Reports, and my wondering about whether 
its references from pubrules were normative, you said

At 08:29 AM 3/11/02 -0600, Dan Connolly wrote:
>[...]
>no. It says "should", not "must".

To quote from pubrules:  "Editors and Team contacts should consult How to 
Write a W3C Technical Report for detailed guidance."  (Note that "should" 
is not in boldface, as are all other occurrences of the RFC2119 keywords in 
pubrules.)

This does seem to imply that one doesn't have to pay attention to all of 
the details of Reports/Style Guide.  But then further down it says, for 
example,

"The Webmaster must have confirmation from the Team contact that:
         1.The status section is novel and complete per the guidelines (per 
April 1999 Chairs meeting)"

where "guidelines" is a link to Reports#status (containing lots of 
bold-face "must").  So the way I would read this is that at least the 
Reports#status stuff is normative (the same #status stuff is in Manual of 
Style, the apparent successor to "Reports").

I think this could all be simplified by merging the pieces together, with 
clear indication of normative/informative status of the various bits.

Regards,
-Lofton.

Received on Wednesday, 13 March 2002 12:37:23 UTC