Re: Dealing with levels in specs

On Fri, 2016-11-18 at 16:07 -0800, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 6:08 AM, Tobie Langel <tobie@codespeaks.com>
> wrote:
> > 
> > On Wed, Nov 16, 2016, at 19:14, Liam R. E. Quin wrote:
> > > In theory there could be a 2nd edition of (say) CSS level 2 text.
> > 
> > Well, if you consider all of these things a mere tags or branches,
> > then's that's fine I suppose.
> 
> I'm not sure why the CSSWG chose to do CSS2.1 2nd edition instead of
> just publishing CSS 2.2; we're *now* publishing 2.2 and it's
> fine.  It would be great to just rule that out, and mandate that
> specs can only have one level.

It's a question of whether we have to deal with what is and what has
been or only what we hope to be. I'm not the one doing the work :-) so
just wanted to point out that the assumption didn't quite hold.


>   We'll never do multiple "editions" of any post-CSS2
> modules; we'll just publish another level.

Other WGs use editions and versions and not levels. So both models are
in use.

[...]

> > For example, simplify the steps to obtain a shortname for new specs
> > that
> > abide by whatever model is agreed upon (i.e. don't need director
> > approval for it).
> 
> Is that one of the issues we're actually running into?

It can cause a delay in some cases today.
[...]

> Like, my personal preference would be URL structures that are
> automatically shaped like:
> 
> /TR/foo-1 <= the level 1 of the foo spec
> /TR/foo-2 <= the level 2 of the foo spec
> /TR/foo   <= the ED of the foo spec
> 
> Or, if we wanted to enforce a little more separation between legal-TR
> and ED, this would also work:
> 
> /TR/foo-1 <= level 1
> /TR/foo-2 <= level 2
> /TR/foo   <= level 2 right now, shifts if level 3 gets published
> /TR/foo/latest <= ED, or with some similar sort of URL pattern

Currently I think the idea is for /TR/foo to go to a Wikipedia
Disambiguation Page :) listing the versions. Certainly I wouldn't want
(say) www.w3.org/TR/xml to go to an editor's draft, since XML is
stable. Same with XQuery or XPath. Going to the latest Rec seems fine
too. Different people want different things from /TR though, and
different WGs and specs work in different ways. I'm fine with Tab's
approach for CSS but not fine with it for some other groups.

Liam

Received on Saturday, 19 November 2016 21:40:06 UTC