Re: Some thoughts on a new publication approach

On 27/10/2013 06:06 , "Martin J. Dürst" wrote:
> I'd personally strongly be against that approach. Even if it's only for
> historical reasons, I want to be able to e.g. find the draft that
> included a once-considered but not adopted feature.

If that's a LC draft (since you're referring to the hiding of 
snapshots), then you can just go to the location which holds snapshots 
and find it. It would also be linked to from the draft.

> I don't think we should do the search engines' work.

I don't really know what that means. In the proposed scheme, if you 
really need to find something that is now gone you have the full power 
of git log at your disposal. That's a lot more than a search engine will 
ever give you.

> It may also be that for whatever reason, some snapshot is more popular.
> It may be that there's a spec that's more interesting to lawyers than to
> implementers, or that a particular version of a spec contains something
> that can be read as a funny joke, or whatever.

Sorry, but these examples seem at best contrived.

> Even more, this proposal, as far as I understand it, would essentially
> make it impossible to go search for "foo-tech Last Call". That would be
> bad. I'm not exactly sure how to express this, but in some way, tweaking
> robots.txt for this feels like censorship to me.

Searching for "foo-tech LC" would most likely bring up the latest draft, 
which has a link to LC. It's not a big deal.

You seem to have a problem that by your own admission you can't really 
describe. That doesn't really make it easy to address. Taking your 
claims to their logical conclusion, any usage of robots.txt is 
censorship. I'm not sure that's a helpful position overall.

> I also don't think we should treat implementers are children

Despite years of experience to the contrary? ;-D

It's not just implementers. It's a lot of people. I'd really like to be 
able to waste less time answering questions that pertain to drafts long 
since updated simply because people aren't heading to the latest.

> But we may
> need to seriously consider what kind of labeling and
> communication/outreach efforts we need, Not everybody in the wider
> implementation community (not only browser vendors, but wide range
> including web agencies,...) is already completely familiar with the
> concept of a "living spec".

Again, I'm not sure what you're trying to get at. You seem to be saying 
something in favour of education.

> I'd also like to have a clearly thought out strategy with respect to
> distinguishing truely dead (i.e. abandoned) specs, and specs that aren't
> updated every month or year because there are no bugs found.

 From the OP:

"""
Finally, when work on a draft stops it should be possible to mark it as 
dead so that it clearly ceases to be a potential reference point.
"""

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

Received on Monday, 28 October 2013 11:22:41 UTC