Re: [ReSpec] dated versions of works in progress

On May 17, 2010, at 16:06 , Dan Connolly wrote:
> I think I saw, in the ReSpec source code, its own bibliography
> of W3C specs. Why is that?
> 
> Does the bibliography generator not suffice for some reason?
> http://www.w3.org/2002/01/tr-automation/tr-biblio-ui

Well, the primary reason is that, as usual, tools are perfectly well hidden deep inside dated space so that they can't ever be found :)

That being said, I don't get the impression that it would address the needs that ReSpec has. The idea of references in ReSpec is that you just mention [[DAHUT]] in the body of the text, and it will automatically insert an entry in the references section, and make that text a link. So it needs a label to biblio entry mapping which it doesn't look like tr-biblio-ui provides. I guess we could have a label to URI mapping and call to this tool, but that would only work while online — I want ReSpec to as much as possible work completely offline (e.g. on the plane) and from the local file system (the only exception being the TR CSS which can't be loaded that way). Also, the ReSpec bib DB (which was pilfered from Bert's CSS spec generation tool) has a lot of references that aren't W3C specifications.

By the way it looks like there's a small bug in the tool. If it doesn't recognise an URI you get:

<dl xmlns:h="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="lmargin tmargin">
  <dt class="tmargin"><a name="" id=""></a></dt>
  <dd>
    <a name="" id=""><cite></cite></a><a href="">,  Editor, W3C  (work in progress), NaN  ,  . </a>
    <a href="" title="Latest version of ">Latest version</a> available at  .
  </dd>
</dl>

Which isn't the best response, some indication of error would probably be more helpful for any tool chained behind this one.

Thanks for the pointer!

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/

Received on Tuesday, 18 May 2010 09:46:38 UTC