RE: References and Modularity

Re HTML5 references http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/references.html#references

and "metadata of references constantly fall out of date":
 

Two things: "greatest good for greatest number". It looks like you are trying to optimize
the work for the editor(s) of specifications. But specifications only have one or a few
editors, while they have many reviewers.  Specifications that are intended to be
standards should be optimized to for the purposes of standards, and in particular
the needs of reviewers and users should take higher priority than the amount of
time an editor spends. 

Secondly you are doing this optimization for the editor at the expense of losing
cruicial information for the review process, and one of the essential tasks for which
standards groups have editors:  to insure the integrity of the references.

You gave as an example:

> [ABNF]
>     Augmented BNF for Syntax Specifications: ABNF, D. Crocker, P. Overell. IETF.
> 
> Would be just:
> 
> [ABNF]
>     Augmented BNF for Syntax Specifications: ABNF. IETF.


However,  the reality is that [ABNF] could have actually changed in ways that
don't match. 

Look, for example, at the
discussion in the IETF JSON working group over updated references to [ABNF]

thread "Update reference for ABNF"
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/json/current/msg00405.html 
thread "Proposed change: update the Unicode version"
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/json/current/msg00301.html
you may think these conversations are unnecessary, extra work and burden,
but they're part of creating one of the things expected of a "standard" --
namely that it has been widely reviewed for consistency. And you can
only insure wide review for consistency if there are no unreviewed
changes during a 'last call' period. 

Whenever A --normative reference -> B and B updates from B1 to B2,
that you actually need to REVIEW whether the changes from B1 to B2
require changes to the language in A. 

Your proposal to remove explicit dates and point to the 'latest version' 
not only removes the opportunity to do this review, it eliminates the
important information of whether the updated reference has
been checked for consistency with your use of the previous referenced
spec.

The other metadata (title, author/editors, organization publishing) are,
in addition to the date, important clues -- when you chase a
URL in A and get 404 Not Found -- as to how you might search for
the intended specification anywhere, e.g., if it moved.

Finally (as a minor point): specifications that don't change substantially
sometimes get reorganized for clarity, but the reorganization plays
havoc with references from other specs into the interior. So if you
say "Section 7.2 of [UNICODE]" but Unicode gets reorganized,
the new section might have a different section number.

Received on Friday, 7 June 2013 16:29:07 UTC