Update on the publication process project

Hi folks,

some of you may remember the TPAC session we had last year on the
publication process, ie pubrules and /TR. Here is an update on some of
our (small) progress.

Denis, who is spending his last weeks with us, has been working on
rewriting from scratch a good chunk of our back end tools for
publication. The current tools are basically ancient and are getting
more and more unusable. As such, he came up with a new DB to maintain
all the information on /TR documents and is currently trying to get it
up and running before his departure. The difficulty was to represent all
the corner cases the webmaster faces when handling publications.

Once he is done, there will be no visible change from the point of view
of the editors and our site users. The main change will be in the back
end. However, the new DB will be a lot more flexible and will allow us
to add new information more easily. One of the information that I'm
interested in exposing is the links to editor's drafts, which will allow
us to generate a version of /TR with them. We'll get the links directly
from the documents so, again, no additional step needed from the
editors.

Regarding generating a new /TR page, it appeared clearly at TPAC that
the current version wasn't being used much by the W3C experts, mainly
due to its painful interface. Even if it is dangerous to extrapolate
from just one single session, I suspect that the feeling is relatively
general in W3C. The old /TR page was a simple list of the documents but
was getting quite long. My thinking has been that we may need a simple
TR page for the W3C community, which allows fast search/navigation, and
a more complex one for the Web at large.

Philippe

Received on Monday, 20 May 2013 16:08:18 UTC