Re: Various respec enhancements ...

Does specref even really support cross-linking?  Or maybe you are using the
term differently than I do?

SpecRef is just a database of bibliographic references.  I suppose it would
be possible to reference items within the other documents (e.g.,
[MyOtherSpec#fragment] but I don't think we do anything like that today.

FWIW the PFWG is going to have a requirement for this sort of thing sooner
than later.  So yes, it would be great if we could settle on a syntax.

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 2:36 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 2:47 AM, Robin Berjon <robin@w3.org> wrote:
> > On 16/09/2014 20:01 , Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> >>> Namespacing would work basically like this. Say you have a markup
> >>> attribute
> >>> and a DOM attribute both called 'unicorn'. You could have
> >>> <dfn>dom:unicorn</dfn> and <dfn>attr:unicorn</dfn>, and
> >>> <a>dom:unicorn</a>
> >>> would link to the right one (and drop the namespace on render of
> course).
> >>> If
> >>> you need a : in your dfn, \-escaping works.
> >>>
> >>> Alternatives would solve the common problem of referring to the same
> dfn
> >>> with variants (typically, plurals) for which today one has to
> annoyingly
> >>> resort to @title. For that, just use <dfn>unicorn|unicorns|long-toothed
> >>> horse</dfn>.
> >>
> >>
> >> We've already solved this problem in Bikeshed/Shepherd, and it would
> >> be a crying shame to have ReSpec try to solve it in an incompatible
> >> way, as it would mean the two types of specs couldn't talk to each
> >> other.
> >
> >
> > I was aware that you'd solved the alternatives issues, which is why I was
> > thinking of the same syntax, but I hadn't seen that you had the
> namespacing
> > as well. That's pretty cool!
>
> It's even stronger than that - some things are namespaced on not just
> their type, but on what thing they're associated with.  CSS, for
> example, defines a million "auto" keywords in various contexts;
> Bikeshed's data model allows them to be marked up with a
> "data-dfn-for" attribute containing what it's for (usually the
> property name), and you can then reference that when auto-linking to
> disambiguate.
>
> >> Bikeshed's relevant documention is here:
> >>
> >> <
> https://github.com/tabatkins/bikeshed/blob/master/docs/definitions-autolinks.md
> >.
> >> We've got a taxonomy of dfn types, which can also be applied to
> >> autolinks to disambiguate.  There are multiple ways to specify what
> >> type a dfn is - an explicit data-dfn-type attribute, an id matching a
> >> particular pattern, a class (on the element or an ancestor) matching a
> >> particular pattern, or the text of the dfn itself matching certain
> >> patterns.  Bikeshed makes this all pretty trivial and turns it
> >> explicit in the source for you, but ReSpec specs obviously would need
> >> to be a little more explicit about things, so that the correct
> >> information shows up in the source html.
> >
> > Actually I'm pretty sure that ReSpec could support exactly the same
> syntax.
>
> The problem is that Shepherd isn't really able to do the ReSpec
> transformations, so it'd need to be reflected in the source.  As an
> offline processor, this is trivial for Bikeshed, but it means more
> work for someone using an online processor like ReSpec.
>
> >> I'd *really* like ReSpec and Bikeshed to agree on this stuff, so that
> >> I can autolink into ReSpec specs.
> >
> > Note that specref has nominal support for cross reference finding, but
> the
> > data is lacking (to say the least). You, Tobie, and I should bang our
> heads
> > together to make this broadly available. It's not rocket surgery.
>
> Yeah, SpecRef's cross-linking support is Anolis-inspired, where you
> have to specify the id every time (and you have to uniquify IDs across
> all documents, I think?).  It's a very poor data model, unfortunately.
> Shepherd (maintain by Peter Linss) does all the parsing and
> dfn-finding for Bikeshed, and is aware of Bikeshed's data model (me
> and Peter evolved it together).  It's publicly available at
> <http://api.csswg.org/shepherd/>.
>
> ~TJ
>
>