Re: Thinking about cross references and ReSpec

On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 12:10 PM, Robin Berjon <robin@w3.org> wrote:

> On 02/10/2014 10:10 , Tobie Langel wrote:
>
>> My plan for this solution is to do daily crawling of relevant specs and
>> extract the dfn and put them in a DB. Further refinements could include
>> a search API, like I added for Specref and exposed within Respec.
>>
>
> Could you somehow reuse or modify what Shepherd does here? If it includes
> enough information (or additional extraction can be easily added) and new
> specs can be added to its crawling (which I suspect ought to be relatively
> easy — I recall Peter's code being able to process quite a lot of different
> documents) then we can all align, which I reckon is a win (even without
> counting the saved cycles).
>

I've bumped into way too many painful issues with non browser-based HTML
parsers to waste more time with them. I'm also very interested in gathering
data from editor's draft which requires a JS runtime for those which use
ReSpec.

Shepherd exposes an API that allows you to just simply dump the data it
> has. If you look inside update.py in Bikeshed you can see how it works.
> What Bikeshed does is, instead of querying services live, allow the user to
> regularly call bikeshed update and get a fresh DB (of a bunch of stuff).
> The same could be injected into SpecRef.


That sounds like a worthwhile idea to explore but seems somewhat orthogonal
to this project, no?

 My focus will be on the gathering the data and providing a JSON API. Not
>> on actual implementation within ReSpec (which I won't have cycles for at
>> that time, I'm afraid).
>>
>
> The hard part is getting the data. Hooking it into ReSpec oughtn't be
> difficult, unless I'm missing something.


Good. (I haven't thought about this at all, so I'll take your word for it).

--tobie