W3C home > Mailing lists > Public > spec-prod@w3.org > October to December 2011

References Re: What are the requirements/problems? Re: Working on New Styles for W3C Specifications

From: Charles McCathieNevile <chaals@opera.com>
Date: Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:44:53 +0100
To: "chairs@w3.org" <chairs@w3.org>, "spec-prod@w3.org" <spec-prod@w3.org>, "Marcos Caceres" <w3c@marcosc.com>
Message-ID: <op.v5tqc3slwxe0ny@widsith-3.local>
On Thu, 01 Dec 2011 18:19:27 +0100, Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com> wrote:

> 4. Do we really still need a bibliography when we use hypertext and in  
> the age of living standards?

Yep.

> How do people actually use bibliographies in the age of HTML (i.e., do
> people care when something was published, who published it, etc. andwhy  
> or why not?)?

Its primary use is in printed versions, with a strong secondary use in  
documents about the spec. In both those cases there is still quite a lot  
of usage of the kinds of information you mentioned. Given that it is  
common to refer to a document by a title and someone who put the words  
there, the author or editor's name(s) are important in many cases,  
although it would work to say that a document was produced by "W3C's  
WigwamForAGossesBridle Working Group" - or even "W3C" for documents which  
are published with consensus.

> Can't we just do away with bibliographies and just cross link to
> specifications.

Not in a printed version, and since printing from the web is still a bit  
arcane that probably means we need it in the standard published version.  
Since we MUST have it for when people print, we don't get to save much  
work by cutting it out of online versions.

That said we could do smarter things than making people go via the  
references section to follow a link - a style like

...in the case where _FudgeAPI stickiness_ [FUDGE] is used ...

would probably be more helpful in an HTML document online.

IMHO

chaals

-- 
Charles 'chaals' McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg kan litt norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com
Received on Thursday, 1 December 2011 18:45:34 UTC

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.1 : Tuesday, 6 January 2015 20:42:19 UTC
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/spec-prod/2011OctDec/0088.html
lists.w3.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-35
12707
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:CCEJ7PVZCIJ4OE2TWIYRGHXQV636E4E5
<urn:uuid:2777e599-4fb1-4cde-a50a-61aafd01f63b>
2015-09-02T10:55:32Z
128.30.52.56
sha1:HBRMDRBQ6FRE3RIUZXTAFN7DCMFB4UYC
<urn:uuid:266ca7ff-973e-4662-85a2-1685939516b9>
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/spec-prod/2011OctDec/0088.html
response
<urn:uuid:8cde06c9-cdb8-46ad-b3d6-bfe79ef19db2>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-171-96-226.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-35
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf