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

On Wednesday, 14 December 2011 at 00:37, "Martin J. Dürst" wrote:

> On 2011/12/13 21:48, Julian Reschke wrote:
> > On 2011-12-13 13:46, Marcos Caceres wrote:
> > > ...
> > > > 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),
> >  
>  
>  
>  
>  
> Please let's avoid such snide remarks between different groups of
> technologies in the W3C. For some people, RDF is weird, for others, it's
> way more natural than XML.


I haven't touched (or encountered it) in in about 10 years, so I wouldn't know any more.  
> Not everybody thinks the same way. And some
> (bravo to Robin) are actually ready to do a bit of work to get the
> format they prefer.

It shouldn't really be necessary, IMO. As shown by Robin's effort, it just ended up falling out of date.   
> Apart from that, I have to say I'm also not happy with that RDF, but my
> main reason is that the order of the authors gets garbled.
>  
> > > 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.
> >  
>  
>  
> I think giving not only a specific programming language (JavaScript) as
> a requirement, but on top of that requiring specific libraries is going
> a bit too far.


I think you misunderstood. I said "like" because I wanted to give those two as examples: though ignoring the dominance of Javascript and JQuery seems counter productive. Regardless, seems kinda sad that the format that the specs is being delivered in is not one that is supported by Web Browsers or easy for Web developers to work with.  
> Other editors might want the same thing for Ruby on
> Rails, Drupal, Movable Type, or what not. Or maybe you just did that to
> provoke discussion :-).


All those have JSON parsers:
http://www.json.org/

Do they have RDF parsers (or whatever it is RDF uses)?  

> Anyway, if you are okay to lower the requirement to just JavaScript, and
> are ready to do a search of two, you would quickly have come up with
> quite a few choices.

Again, I used JavaScript as an example - the requirement is "lots of people can use it on the Web without special tools". Seems like a no brainer. Putting RDF in front of developers raises unnecessary road blocks and a steep learning curve.

Received on Wednesday, 14 December 2011 01:05:39 UTC