w3c / epub-specs

Shared workspace for EPUB 3 specifications.
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URI mention without reference #2594

Closed mattgarrish closed 9 months ago

mattgarrish commented 11 months ago

Section 5.5.3.1 says:

EPUB creators MAY specify additional identifiers. The identifiers should be fully qualified URIs.

But we dropped URI references during 3.3 in favour of URL.

I think this could be rewritten as:

EPUB creators MAY specify additional identifiers. The identifiers should be absolute-url strings [url].

Since it's an informative recommendation, this change shouldn't rise above class 2, at least.

iherman commented 11 months ago

Ouch. Good catch...

mattgarrish commented 11 months ago

If we really want to nitpick, shouldn't this also be modified to: "All identifiers should be..."

Right now, it sounds like it's saying only any additional identifiers should be absolute-url strings. The original 3.0 wording was "It is strongly recommended that all identifiers be...".

iherman commented 11 months ago

If we really want to nitpick, shouldn't this also be modified to: "All identifiers should be..."

Right now, it sounds like it's saying only any additional identifiers should be absolute-url strings. The original 3.0 wording was "It is strongly recommended that all identifiers be...".

Hm. You are right but if I was very, very picky I would say that this change could be considered as class 3 change, because there is (albeit infinitesimal) chance that there are implementations that have passed the bar with the current version and would not with the new one!😀 But let us not be that picky, right?

mattgarrish commented 11 months ago

I would say that this change could be considered as class 3 change

But it's still only informative advice, so all or some or none can be absolute-url strings and it technically changes nothing. I think we're safe at 2 even with the extra change.

mattgarrish commented 11 months ago

If we want to avoid changing that wording, though, I'd be equally fine with just splitting the sentence into a new paragraph. So long as it doesn't immediately follow the text about additional identifiers, like it does now, it should be fine as is.

iherman commented 11 months ago

Actually, putting it into a separate paragraph is probably better.

mattgarrish commented 11 months ago

Ya, not to belabour the discussion of this, but part of me really wants to put the text in a note. It sounds too much like a normative recommendation, plus there's no explanation given why we're recommending this practice. If we move it to a note, we could add a bit more text that domain-specific urls tend to be more reliably unique and urns allow the type of identifier to be specified. That was why we added this guidance in the first place.