UAX21 and UAX27 need updating — but how?

[frivoal]

The UAX21 and UAX27 entries are out of date. Not only are there later incarnations of the same documents, but also these documents have eventually been discontinued and their content merged to an other spec (Core Specification of the Unicode Standard). What should we do?

It makes sense to me to:

1. Update them to the latest standalone version
2. add an obsoletedBy key to point to the document that replaces them.

However, client software that read from specref do not currently support obsoletedBy. Should we just fix them? Should we mark it some other way?

--

issue raised from w3c/csswg-drafts#1169 (comment)
bikeshed issue about supporting obsoletedBy: speced/bikeshed#427

[tobie]

IMHO, obsoletedBy only makes sense in cases where there's ambiguity as to which spec we now want to reference. In cases where it's obvious what new spec to use instead, maybe aliasing is the better option. What do you think? /cc @tabatkins, @marcoscaceres

[tabatkins]

Aliasing might be sufficient, but in general it's often too strong - it means that no one can ever refer to the older version, even if they very intentionally want to. (For example, to compare and contrast an older document with a newer one.)

My plan is to throw an error by default when you have an obsolete biblio ref, letting you know what you should be linking to, but give some syntax for suppressing that error and just linking to the obsolete thing.

[tobie]

Aliasing might be sufficient, but in general it's often too strong - it means that no one can ever refer to the older version, even if they very intentionally want to. (For example, to compare and contrast an older document with a newer one.)

Agreed.

My plan is to throw an error by default when you have an obsolete biblio ref, letting you know what you should be linking to, but give some syntax for suppressing that error and just linking to the obsolete thing.

I didn't know you were planning to add syntax to suppress the error. That makes the distinction between obsolescence and aliasing worthwhile. So WFM.

Heads up that obsoletedBy returns an array of identifiers. Adding a few tests right now to see if we can provide some guarantees about the references these identifiers point to like we can with aliasOf.

[tobie]

Guarantees added. See: README.

[tabatkins]

And Bikeshed now tracks and follows obsoletes/obsoletedBy data; using an obsolete biblio ref is a fatal error that tells you what to replace it with (following aliases/obsoletedBy transitively). (I'll be adding the ability to suppress the error shortly.)

By the way, the following refs are marked as being obsolete, but the thing they claim should obsolete them doesn't exist in the db:

• nic15392
• ien115
• ien119
• nic15390
• ien123
• ien133
• nic18640
• nic15389
• nic16238
• nic16239

[tobie]

Wow. That is weird and should have been caught by the the test suite. Need to dig into this to find what the problem is.

[frivoal]

Opened a new issue to follow up on #347 (comment), which is a separate problem.