Re: Long lists of Editors and SpecRef entry generation

Hi Manu,

A few comments inline:

Ven 02 sept 2022, à 15:59, Manu Sporny a écrit :
> * Shortening the display of specifications with lots of Editors (past
> and present), but allowing the list to be expanded. This means that
> the Editor's list will be "PersonA, PersonB, PersonC, et. al ->",
> where the "et. al ->" could be clicked on to reveal the full list of
> Editors.

That's something that ReSpec and/or Bikeshed could implement on their end. It might also be possible to have it as part of the W3C CSS/JS templates ?

> * Allowing us to manually construct the SpecRef entry as the "Authors"
> are not integrated into the SpecRef entry and they really should be.

Specref itself doesn't make a distinction between editors, authors, etc. It only uses a single field[1], called "authors" for historical reasons. 

Including more roles in that field shouldn't be a problem. Those would either need to be added upstream or via *overwrites*[2].

Worth noting that Specref has a boolean "etAl" field[3] that's set to `true` when it is known to Specref that some authors/editors are missing from the "authors" field.

> * Retiring the concept of Editors and Authors and moving to single
> "Lead Contributors" that bundles Editors, Authors, and Chairs (we
> really need to start recognizing Chairs) model... though I expect this
> is going to be difficult to do from a cultural perspective.

I personally like that idea and believe it can be a bottom-up change. I don't see any issues with someone starting to do that for the specs that they're managing, in particular if there's code to deal with the frontend aspect of things in BikeShed and ReSpec.

> Have these topics been considered lately on spec-prod? What are
> people's thoughts on the topic? I'm in a position where I'm having to
> push back on the removal of significant contributors to a spec because
> people seem to not like the long list of Editors that are showing up
> (from a visually cluttered perspective).

I think that giving credit is easy and often important for people's contribution to be recognized by their employer (and thus allows them to continue contributing). I like your proposal. It does imply figuring out who will be displayed upfront and who will be hidden behind a prompt, though, which is something we'd need to have agreement about.

--tobie

---
[1]: https://github.com/tobie/specref/blob/3ecee27/schemas/reference.json#L103-L108
[2]: https://github.com/tobie/specref/blob/3ecee27/scripts/helper.js#L79-L135
[3]: https://github.com/tobie/specref/blob/3ecee27/schemas/reference.json#L109-L112

Received on Friday, 2 September 2022 17:19:02 UTC