Re: Updating our /TR stylesheets

Thanks for providing some background, Philippe. Wasn't aware of the context.

On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 4:00 PM, 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.


I actually wasn't aware there were dramatically different spec styles and
assumed that was more of a bug than a feature. Frankly, this is not how
publishing is generally done, and I fail to understand the benefits of this
strategy.

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.


Agreed. I assumed a common HTML structure along with a common stylesheet
which could have been changed easily.

 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.


Oh agreed. Wasn't aware it would be time consuming to do so I assumed that
it would be simpler.

So my suggestion given this context is to go with pre 2015 style and
continuous deployment for new specs.

--tobie