Re: Update on the publication process project

On 30/05/2013 09:27 , Tobie Langel wrote:
> Did the first (semi-) automatic merge from /TR today (ran
> scripts/rdf.js).
>
> Here's the output commit:
> https://github.com/tobie/specref/commit/46240442.
>
> Works like a breeze. This should be the end of manual updates to the
> biblio.js for all things W3C. :)

\o/ You're a superstar.

> Note we still have to decide what data the main entry should expose
> by default and then decide where to implement this (in the API, or in
> scripts/rdf.js).

To give some context to those who might not have been fully following: 
in the internal data model that specref uses, a bibliographic entry maps 
not to one document, but to a collection of versions of that document. 
Some of those versions are dated, some of them are "latest TR", some are 
editor's drafts. This provides us with flexibility in that the DB does 
not have to pick a side in the debate about whether referencing a stable 
date or an evolving draft is best — you can do both.

But flexibility is only great if it happens to be what you need; when 
you don't care you just want things to work. You want a simple reference 
to produce just one document, not a collection, and you want that to be 
a predictable version. So we need a default.

Given that the current only user of specref is ReSpec, and given that 
the ReSpec preference has for the past four years to prefer referencing 
the ED or the latest TR, I think that the default that would break the 
least things would be to stick to that.

To make this more concrete to ReSpec users, imagine you wished to 
reference a [DAHUT] document. You can now do it in the following ways:

   [DAHUT-19770315]
   This will produce a ref to the matching dated version.

   [DAHUT-ED]
   This will produce a ref to the Editor's Draft.

   [DAHUT-TR]
   This will produce a ref to the latest TR (I'm not sure this is 
actually supported at this point).

   [DAHUT]
   Most of the time this is what you want to use, so the question is 
which of the above it maps to. I'm suggesting that in keeping with what 
we already had it does ED, and if none exists then TR.

The idea is also that you could override the default globally for a 
document. So for instance if you prefer latest TR over ED, you could 
configure ReSpec with something like preferReference: "TR" and all your 
references would take that default instead.

Does this make sense?

Unrelated question: is there still interest in providing the DB with 
different formats (e.g. XML, for people using XMLSpec)?

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Thursday, 30 May 2013 09:16:35 UTC