Re: PROPOSAL: Procedure to Promote Progress With Accessibility Issues in HTML5

Shelley Powers:
> > It gets fuzzy after that point. Sorry if I'm asking for what's
> > obvious to everyone else, but could you give me the precise steps
> > to take, from prep of voting text, to vote, to incorporation into
> > existing working draft based on your preferred approach (camera
> > ready spec text)?

Sam Ruby:
> Anybody who wishes to edit can arrange to do so:
> 
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/2009Jul/0018.html
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/2009Jul/0017.html
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-in-xhtml-tf/2009Jul/0019.html
> 
> Once a tangible work product (be it a completely independent spec or
> a "mashup") is produced and a minimum level of diverse public support
> is demonstrated, a vote can be called for[1], and the work product
> (and by implication, the editor that produced it) can be viewed as
> "official".

It seems to me that producing these “branched” versions of the spec is
more difficult than it should be.  If this duelling specs approach is
indeed the process the WG is following, then it should be easy for
someone to check out a copy of the HTML 5 spec source, make their
updates and pull changes from the “main” branch (i.e., Ian’s version of
the spec).  CVS doesn’t make this terribly easy to do, but I guess
that’s what we’re stuck with.


The following is how the HTML 5 spec is built, AIUI.  The HTML 5 spec
source lives in the WHATWG Subversion server:

  http://svn.whatwg.org/webapps/source

Using some build scripts that I believe aren’t published anywhere, the
WHATWG version of the spec

  http://svn.whatwg.org/webapps/index

and the W3C single-page version of the spec

  http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/html5/spec/Overview.html

are generated.  Only the final HTML form of the spec is checked in to
W3C CVS.  Mike’s scripts then split the W3C version of the spec into the
multipage version:

  http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/html5/spec/index.html


If, hypothetically, I were interested in producing one of these branched
specs, I would want to be able to do something like:


  # Check out the repository
$ cvs -d :ext:username@dev.w3.org/sources/public co html5

  # Copy a “template” directory into a new directory for my draft
$ cd html5
$ mkdir spec-mccormack
$ cp template/* spec-mccormack

  # Do an initial first build, which would fetch
  # http://svn.whatwg.org/webapps/index and record which revision it got
$ cd spec-mccormack
$ make

  # Check in this draft (currently identical to Ian’s), which would
  # result in it being visible as
  # http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-mccormack/
$ cvs add *
$ cvs commit -m 'Initial commit of spec-mccormack.'

  # Now I make some changes to the spec, then build and commit them
$ vi source
$ make
$ cvs commit -m 'Undeprecate @summary!'

  # Merge recent changes from Ian’s draft, then commit them (this would
  # perhaps leave merge conflict markers in ‘source’)
$ make merge
$ make
$ cvs commit -m 'Merge in changes from Ian’s draft.'


Now, most of that Makefile/template stuff shouldn’t be hard to set up.
The only things missing are the parts of Ian’s build scripts that aren’t
handled by a regular Anolis invocation, which I think is the document
prologue (all the stuff before the ToC) and handling the <!--START-->
and <!--END--> markers which delineate the separate specs that are
generated from the source (HTML 5, Web Database, Web Storage, Web
Workers, Web Socket specs).  Maybe other things too, I’m not sure.

-- 
Cameron McCormack ≝ http://mcc.id.au/

Received on Wednesday, 22 July 2009 03:18:04 UTC