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

Marcon,

At 12/14/2011 03:02 PM, Marcos Caceres 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.

I beg to disagree.  My Working Group (in conjunction with a sister 
WG) publishes up to ten or eleven documents in sync.  When we publish 
a WD for one of these documents, we want their references to other 
documents in the group to be explicitly to the dated WD, not to the 
"latest version".  Why?  Simple -- when we have a need to reference 
an older version in TR date space, we want its links to be fully 
consistent with that specific document.

There is no implication of "stability", but one of consistency.

You also said:

> > Perhaps we could also have a [FOO-ED] convention?
>A lot of editors would prefer the Editor's Draft to actually be the 
>authoritative draft. Appearing on /TR/ MUST NOT be taken as a sign 
>of maturity or stability (unless the spec is REC or PR). All other 
>statuses are as unstable as each other.

Again, I disagree that this is always the right thing to do.  In my 
WG, we rarely have our many editor's drafts in sync except when we're 
ready to publish a set of public WDs.  I don't object to some WGs 
making their Editor's Drafts authoritative, but I object strongly to 
the presumption that all WGs will do so.

Hope this helps,
    Jim

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Jim Melton --- Editor of ISO/IEC 9075-* (SQL)     Phone: +1.801.942.0144
   Chair, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC32 and W3C XML Query WG    Fax : +1.801.942.3345
Oracle Corporation        Oracle Email: jim dot melton at oracle dot com
1930 Viscounti Drive      Alternate email: jim dot melton at acm dot org
Sandy, UT 84093-1063 USA  Personal email: SheltieJim at xmission dot com
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Received on Wednesday, 14 December 2011 23:04:11 UTC