Re: How to link W3C Technical Reports

On Wed, 2007-02-28 at 01:19 +0100, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> Dear W3C Communications Team,
> 
>   I would like to link to section 8.15 of the Odiferous Style Sheets 1.0
> Recommendation from my OSS 1.0 Tutorial. In a few weeks it will turn out
> that section has a major error, and a few months later W3C will issue
> the Odiferous Style Sheets 1.0 Second Edition Recommendation to correct
> the problem (after the bugs introduced in the PER had been fixed...) A
> year later the group will publish the Odiferous Style Sheets 2.0 REC and
> it will no longer include what was in section 8.15 of the 1.0 version.
> 
> My link should neither break nor reference outdated information (until 
> the Odiferous Style Sheets 1.0 Recommendation is no longer believed to
> be appropriate for implementation). How can I make such a link (there
> obviously is no simple answer to this)? If that is not possible, why
> not?

Hi Bjoern,

This has happened to me in practice. I don't think there's any
perfect solution (until the day we can do redirects with
fragids as Bert Bos has suggested [1]).

One idea: redirect the URI to section 8.15 to a "changes" chapter. In
that chapter, explain in prose what changed and where to turn. You might
even have a fragid in the changes chapter so that user agents that
re-append the fragid on the redirected URI land right on the explanation
they seek.

I welcome other suggestions,

 _ Ian

[1] http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/draft-bos-http-redirect-00.txt

-- 
Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel:                     +1 718 260-9447