- From: Robin Berjon <robin@berjon.com>
- Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:58:50 +0100
- To: Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com>
- Cc: "chairs@w3.org Chairs" <chairs@w3.org>, "spec-prod@w3.org Prod" <spec-prod@w3.org>
On Dec 13, 2011, at 12:39 , Marcos Caceres wrote: > 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). Maybe it's just me, but isn't this thread on references ratholing of spectacular proportions*? There are a number of things that make specs harder to read than they need to be, but I'm very much unconvinced that this is one of them. > 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. http://specifiction.com/ (the DB for which is out of date) provides JSON and JSONP interfaces. It needs to be rewritten, which shouldn't take much time but does require me finding a day off at some point. The plan though was indeed to provide this sort of central repository. Feel free to toss requirements my way so that I have them around when I get to hacking on it. * Which I guess may be the kind of holing that happens when rodents of unusual size are involved. I'll get my coat. -- Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon
Received on Tuesday, 13 December 2011 12:59:25 UTC