[sorry for the incomplete message earlier - keyboard glitch]
Have you considered moving the spec drafting to a revision
controlled system, such as git? Michael Smith maintains an
annotated and hyperlinked version of ES5.1 here
http://es5.github.com/. A system like this would certainly
make your maintenance tasks easier, in addition to facilitating
a simplified workfow for creating experimental versions.
It would be interesting to know what tools were used to generate
the HTML version from the PDF - somewhere in that toolchain,
hyperlinks were added.
The formal standards process is still targeted towards producing
paper documents and Ecma currently requires that these
documents be delivered in MS Word format and follow specific
styling guidelines (there is what is essentially an ISO standard
for standards that we are supposed to follow).
Ecma-262 is a complex document. Edition 6 is likely to exceed
300 pages. While Word is far from perfect, it actually provides
reasonable support and tooling for documents of that size. It
isn't clear to me how github would help with such a document.
While I have no fundamental objection to an HTML based
document and editing environment, I have no interest to
reverting to doing manual formatting markug. I moved
beyond that technology around 1985.
My favourite tested technology for that size documents would
be LaTeX;-) But there is no need to switch away from the tools
you are using. At least, I think that Word has "Export To XML"
and "Import From XML" functionality.
So the XML version could be on github, and serve for patch
sending and discussion, as well as giving a basis for tools to
work on (such as a search/replace for adding hyperlinks). I
do not know what Word offers in the way of collaborative
editing, but even if you don't want to use github collaboration,
having a spec version on github that can be processed by tools
would be great.
Assuming, of course, that the exported XML is not completely
unreadable!-)
I do understand that you have more important tasks to worry
about for the foreseeable future than adding hyperlinks[*].
When the time comes to add them, please remember to turn
bookmarks into "named destinations" as well? It allows to
open PDF documents with URL fragments, jumping directly
to the named sections.
Claus
http://clausreinke.github.com/
[*] In LaTeX, at least, internal hyperlinks would be logical,
not absolute, so I'm surprised to hear that they would
pose maintenance problems during drafting in Word.
_______________________________________________
es-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
