[xml2rfc] Reference data from W3C

[duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp (Martin Duerst)]

Dear XML2RFC maintainers,

Many thanks for your excellent work. xml2rfc is really extremely
helpful. However, here's a small, but serious, complaint.

As the co-chair of the IETF LTRU WG, I recently asked
the editors of a draft to improve a reference to a W3C spec.
The old version of the reference read:
[XML10]    Bray (et al), T., "Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0",
           February 2004.

What the editors did was that they got the reference from the
citation library at http://xml.resource.org/public/rfc/bibxml4/,
and ended up with the following:
   [W3C.REC-xml-20040204]
              Yergeau, F., Paoli, J., Sperberg-McQueen, C., Bray, T.,
              and E. Maler, "Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Third
              Edition)", W3C REC REC-xml-20040204, February 2004.
(see http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ltru-matching-14.txt).
They got the data from
http://xml.resource.org/public/rfc/bibxml4/reference.W3C.REC-xml-20040204.xml

The above reference is inappropriate, because it lists the authors
in the wrong order (I'll come to a few other nits later). The correct
order, as you can see from http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204,
is Bray, Paoli, Sperberg-McQueen, Maler, Yergeau.

My guess was that this wrong order was taken from the W3C TR page at
http://www.w3.org/TR/. However, that currently shows Yergeau, Maler,
Bray, Sperberg-McQueen, Paoli (not correct either). That page in turn
is generated from RDF (at http://www.w3.org/2002/01/tr-automation/tr.rdf).
The reason the order of the authors isn't maintained is that RDF, by
default, doesn't provide order among tuples (even if they are ordered
when in RDF/XML form), and that the designers of the relevant schema
ignored this fact and the fact that author order is significant.

My current guess is that the order in the xml2rdf reference data was
taken from an earlier version of the TR database, where the order
was by chance different. But I'm looking forward to know what the
actual reason for this confusion is. I also hope that the data can
be cleaned up as quickly as possible, on both sides.

Here is what I'd like to see (adapted from
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3987.txt):

   [XML1]         Bray, T., Paoli, J., Sperberg-McQueen, C., Maler, E.,
                  and F. Yergeau, "Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0
                  (Third Edition)", World Wide Web Consortium
                  Recommendation, February 2004,
                  <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml>.

There are three important points here:
- The order of the authors.
- The fact that it says "World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation"
  rather than "W3C REC REC".
- The fact that it uses an actual URI (which could be
  http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204 if it's important
  to designate the precise version). While in the IETF, things
  such as draft-ietf-ltru-matching-14.txt are the 'real thing',
  and any URIs such as
  http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ltru-matching-14.txt
  are just for convenience, and there are many of them, this
  is completely different for the W3C. The URI is the real thing,
  and the W3C is very careful to make sure these are kept as persistent
  as possible. Something like REC-xml-20040204, on the other hand,
  has no official standing in a W3C context.


Regards,     Martin.

P.S.:

http://xml.resource.org/public/rfc/bibxml4/reference.W3C.REC-xml-19980210.xml
lists Maler, DeRose, and Orchard as authors for XML 1.0, which is
definitely wrong (I personally associate this set of authors with XLink),
and gives a title of "XML 1.0 Recommendation", whereas the correct
title is "Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0"
(see http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-xml-19980210). I couldn't come
up with an explanation for that.



#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:[e-mail]