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

--  
Marcos Caceres


On Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 12:37 PM, Julian Reschke wrote:

> On 2011-12-13 12:39, Marcos Caceres wrote:
> >  
> >  
> > On Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 11:18 AM, Julian Reschke wrote:
> >  
> > > (a) Following the link might get you a 404. Yes, cool URIs do not
> > > change, but unfortunately some orgs do not get that.
> >  
> >  
> >  
> > Some go out of business, so sometimes it's not their fault… sometimes things just change (e.g., companies change names and their old domains are forgotten about).
> > > When that happes,
> > > additional information like the full title, the organization, the date
> > > and the authors can help finding the document somewhere else.
> >  
> >  
> >  
> > Question is still if you need all four. Certainly, all four provide a lot of redundancy and fallback, but that comes at the cost to the Editor: I'm personally tired of having to keep my references up to date (it's very time consuming), so I'm simply not doing it any more unless it can be proved that it is not possible to find a document with just the old URL and the title… I've actually kept the organization in my specs, but that's it. I also see others moving towards this model (e.g., HTML5, DOM4, which have kept author and org, but have dropped showing dates, status of document, and "available at" etc. which is seen in "classical" referencing).
> > ...
>  
>  
>  
> With the proper document source format, you can automate up-to-date  
> changes, at least for W3C and IETF specs.

Certainly, but someone has to create such a tool and provide the references in a useable format. Last I checked, the W3C did provide all the references in some weird and obscure format (RDF), though looking at /TR/ right now, there is not even a link there anymore to the RDF file. Much more helpful would be JSON or plain XML so it can actually be parsed easily by off the shelf tools like Node.js and JQuery.

Received on Tuesday, 13 December 2011 12:46:52 UTC