Re: Dealing with levels in specs

On Sat, Nov 19, 2016 at 1:39 PM, Liam R. E. Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 2016-11-18 at 16:07 -0800, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>>   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.

They're all the same thing, tho, so we (the W3C) can just settle on
one definitive model and encode it in our URL structure.
Straightforward increasing integers are simple and easy to work with
for both humans and machines.

> [...]
>
>> > 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.

The whole point of this exercise is getting to a consistent future for
*all* the groups. It kinda defeats the purpose to have one URL
structure for CSS and different ones for other WGs. ^_^

I'm okay with /TR/foo going to a disambiguation page, at minimum
pointing to the latest published TR-level document and the ED.
That'll probably break some links in CSS specs, but our EDs get
auto-built, and we can mass-republish our TR-level stuff. Then
/TR/foo-1, etc can go to the TR-level documents, and /TR/foo-latest
can go to the ED.

~TJ

Received on Monday, 21 November 2016 23:43:42 UTC