Re: Updating our /TR stylesheets

On 04/16/2015 09:43 AM, Tobie Langel wrote:
> Separation between style and content--which incidentally is how I 
> heard about Web standards even before I had published (or should I say 
> authored?) my first Web page--should let us change styles without 
> affecting any of the legal requirements we have or what am I missing? 
> Frankly, if, as a standards boy, we write technology for separation of 
> content and style, promote it as a best practice, then not apply it to 
> the documents we publish, I find we just loose credibility.
You're assuming all authors of previous documents wouldn't mind to have 
the style of their documents changed. Past experiences showed that it's 
not the case. This is not just technical or a resource challenge here.

>
> If there are rules in place that make it impossible to change the 
> style of already published documents (which seems bizarre, I've never 
> heard someone claiming a Comic Sans version of the constitution 
> diverges from the original text), can we just freeze pre 2015 specs, 
> then change those rules and shift to a continuously deployed solution 
> for new specs?
There are no such rules. We change the style in the past and had to 
revert it in fact.

I'm proposing that we put such rule on ourselves to simplify the way 
forward for the time being. The other path of trying to change past 
documents failed so far for various reasons. To me, the automatic 
publication system or our switch to https are more  important than 
changing the style of the first edition of XML 1.0 or the style of SOAP 
1.2.

> I mean, I applaud trying to find creative solutions to this problem 
> that has been going on for years, but this feels about the same as 
> administration's website that aren't available outside of office hours 
> (yes, this exists).

I would note that it doesn't prevent from solving the problem of old 
documents in the future. It's just something where I don't think we 
should spend the time on for the moment. I'd prefer the energy to go 
into the modern tools proposed by Robin.

Philippe

Received on Thursday, 16 April 2015 14:00:26 UTC