Re: Looking at editor’s drafts or /TR (was: URI tokenization and tabs)

On Sat, 2013-03-23 at 16:11 +0000, Simon Sapin wrote:
> Le 23/03/2013 06:19, Liam R E Quin a écrit :
> > Documents on dev.w3.org or dvcs.w3.org may or may not represent the
> > consensus of a Working Group, and are usually just working drafts not
> > ready to be implemented.

> I’s not always that simple.

True, but it's a good start.

> We published this month a new css3-page WD. Before that, some changes 
> that had been resolved by the working group had been sitting for 
> *several years* in the ED, unpublished on /TR.

It would be good if the publishing were more frequent. But you are
deducing the contrapositive.

The official story is that a Recommendation has been through the W3C
Process, that other Rec-track documents on /TR are at varaious
well-defined stages along the way, and that documents elsewhere do not
have such a clear definition.

Sure, a draft will usually be newer, and will likely contain a mix of
agreed-upon resolutions and undiscussed text.

> Some documents on /TR are "dangerously outdated". Some, but *not all of 
> them* are marked as such in big letter. The 2003 css3-syntax WD is an 
> example.

We should fix that.

> What’s the process for getting non-content updates to /TR, such as 
> adding an obsolescence notice? Is it easier than a new WD?

If there's a newer Recommendation it's very easy. Until then the
document on /TR is normative for the Web, and it's the responsibility of
the WG to update it there; updating a WD on /TR is very easy as long as
the document's format is OK (meets pubrules). The process comes in for a
first public working draft (still fairly easy but you need permissison
for the shortname) and for moving to & beyond Last Call, where liaisons
with other groups start coming into play more formally.

Supposedly no draft on /TR should be more than six months out of date
(this is the purpose of the "heartbeat" requirement) but in practice I
know all too well it's not always like that.

I wrote quickly to try & head off the idea that www.w3.org/TR was out of
date and could be entirely ignored for all documents, which is a bad
idea! :-)

Thanks,

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

Received on Saturday, 23 March 2013 16:56:34 UTC