Re: References Re: What are the requirements/problems? Re: Working on New Styles for W3C Specifications

Just as an example scenario, I've taken to reading most PDF documents on 
my Kindle.

Which means it is really useful to have a good "paper" format, but it 
shares some of the capabilities of a linked HTML version.

-Eric.

On 12/12/11 2:52 PM, Noah Mendelsohn wrote:
>
>
> On 12/12/2011 12:12 PM, Marcos Caceres wrote:
>> I still would like to see what this means. In practice, trying to "use"
>> a printed spec is hard (it's not really searchable, and you can't really
>> find what terms means because they are defined throughout a
>> specification).
>
> The relative merits of print vs. on-screen are endlessly debated, but 
> I think we should acknowledge that there are a variety of reasons that 
> some people, some times, prefer to work with paper. That may be so 
> they can write notes in the margin (yes, you can get online tools to 
> do this, but they are arguably clumsier than scrawling and circling 
> with a pen, and certainly not universally available); it may just be, 
> as in my case, that there are times when I prefer to read when there's 
> no machine handy, when the paper copy is easier to read, etc.
>
> Maybe or maybe not print is still important for archiving. (Another 
> long debate we shouldn't rathole on here, but there is a case to be 
> made that paper documents sometimes survive long after the formatting 
> software needed to recreate them from electronic originals.)
>
> Of course, the linking, zooming, split screen, and other capabilities 
> of on screen formats can be of great value, and I like most of us do 
> most of my reading online. Absolutely, we should make sure our 
> documents work well on screen, are extensively hyperlinked, etc.
>
> So, I suggest that we take it as a given that W3C specifications must 
> format well for printing, and should print with bibliographies etc. 
> that meet the reasonable expectations of those used to reading printed 
> specifications. If over time, the need for that diminishes, maybe we 
> should reconsider, but I don't feel we're at that point today.
>
> As I wrote earlier, I also think biblios in particular are better 
> >archival< indications of what was intended as a referent. Even if a 
> linnk goes 404, it's very useful to know from the biblio to know that 
> the intention was to link version V of specifcation S.
>
> Noah
>

Received on Monday, 12 December 2011 22:57:49 UTC