[Encoding] Last Call Comment: Supporting files referenced rather than copied

Dear I18N WG,

This is a last call comment on the Encoding spec 
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-encoding-20140603/).

In the "Status of this Document", it claims the following:

"This is a snapshot of the editor's document, as of the date shown on 
the title page, .... The primary reason that W3C is publishing this 
document is so that HTML5 and other specifications may normatively refer 
to a stable W3C Recommendation."

Unlike most other (W3C) specs, the Encoding spec requires a lot of 
supplementary data (see e.g. the 'index-...' links at 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-encoding-20140603/#legacy-single-byte-encodings 
and elsewhere). However, all this supplementary data seems to be 
provided by links to the WHATWG version of the spec (e.g. 
http://encoding.spec.whatwg.org/index-iso-8859-2.txt).

As a result, the goal of "stable W3C Recommendation" will not be 
achieved because the WHATWG may decide to change any of the 'index-' 
files at any date if they think this is appropriate.

I can imagine various reasons for the above, among else:
- This was an oversight (-> please fix)
- This was done to save work (-> please work harder :-)
- This was done to be able to pretend that there's a stable
   version but keep as much agility as possible, hoping nobody
   finds out.

Either way, it doesn't work. While it may keep the algorithms stable, it 
won't keep the data stable. The worst thing would be for the algorithms 
and the data to get out of sync (simple case: WHATWG decides that it's 
more straightforward to move an offset constant from the algorithm to 
the data or vice versa).


Regards,   Martin.

Received on Monday, 9 June 2014 09:06:07 UTC