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

On Wednesday, 14 December 2011 at 22:14, Robin Berjon wrote:

> On Dec 14, 2011, at 23:02 , Marcos Caceres wrote:
> > On Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 9:11 PM, Robin Berjon wrote:
> > > This brings me to a convention I've been advocating here and there but that hasn't been formalised. There are use cases both for point to the latest version, and for pointing to a specific version that you don't want to see change beneath your feet.  
> >  
> >  
> > Whoa! hang on. No Working Draft should be cited that way (i.e., as stable!). That's why HTML5 has the *big red warning* and document's SoTD always says that documents may be obsoleted at any time (unless they are Recs) and it's inappropriate to cite them as anything but a work in progress.  
>  
>  
> Who's talking about WDs? http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/ now refers to SVG 1.1 edition 2, but used to refer to 1.1 edition 1, and before that to 1.0. Things do change.
Are they backwards compatible? Is there really a case for version locking? Do you really want people implementing the old versions of SVG?  
> Besides, it can make a lot of sense for work in progress to reference specific versions of other work in progress.

So I keep hearing, but I don't see any valid case being presented.   
> In general I'm more in favour of letting editors be smart and not coming at them with my high horses — but I guess tastes differ there!

Well, depends. Sometimes it's really harmful. It means that people might end up implementing a wrong version of a spec because one spec put a normative dependency on a dated spec. This happened to me on more than one occasion - it was horrific.

Received on Wednesday, 14 December 2011 22:23:23 UTC