Re: Updating our /TR stylesheets

I am in favor of this. But as to changing the styles of previous specs... I
agree that styles should not be retroactively changed.  Some specs (notably
*mine*) often have PDF and postscript versions published along with them.
Changing a stylesheet would break things like that.  Also, if I remember
correctly, the previous attempt at changing the styles was pretty radical
and actually altered not just the look but also the order and some of the
content.  That was sort of a disaster.  Stylesheets can be used to alter
the look without munging the contents.  This is super important for A11Y
and I am sure we all know this.  Let's be careful, but let's make progress!

On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 9:00 AM, Philippe Le Hegaret <plh@w3.org> wrote:

> 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
>
>
>


-- 
Shane McCarron
Managing Director, Applied Testing and Technology, Inc.