Good practice for biblio keys and changes to its status and href

[csarven]

I'd like to get a sound check before making a PR, and this generally applies to any entry where its href and status may change.

Example:

I'd like to add entries, e.g., SOLID-PROTOCOL ( https://solidproject.org/TR/protocol ) and WAC ( https://solidproject.org/TR/wac ). Those reports currently have status "Draft Community Group Report" at W3C. Work on those reports may continue under a W3C WG, and if published, the URLs for "published" versions will be under w3.org.

What may be a good practice here as far as using the same or different keys for reports with different statuses? If the same key is used while the status and href changes, would that considered be a bad practice considering, e.g., references made while at status A may not be accurate or meaningful when the status changes to B?

I suspect that using the same key but changing status and href values in the future may not be a major problem because the biblio information in the generated HTML will just use the latest values from status and href every time.

For example, would the following (entry snippet) be considered okay:

Today:

"SOLID-PROTOCOL": {
  "href": "https://solidproject.org/TR/protocol",
  "status": "Draft Community Group Report"
}

In the future:

"SOLID-PROTOCOL": {
  "href": "https://www.w3.org/TR/solid-protocol",
  "status": "REC"
}

Thoughts?

[tidoust]

If the same key is used while the status and href changes, would that considered be a bad practice considering, e.g., references made while at status A may not be accurate or meaningful when the status changes to B?

That essentially happens all the time. There is no guarantee that the status of a specification returned by SpecRef for a key be stable. For example, take HTML, DOM, or WEBIDL. The keys used to return the W3C versions of the specs. They now return the WHATWG versions.

The guarantee is that the key will continue to exist and point at the latest version of the spec. Another guarantee is that, if you create dated entries such as dom-20151119, they will continue to exist forever (and should continue to point at the dated version).

[tobie]

I think @tidoust's comments above address our common practice well. Should we add something to this effect to the README or is what's there sufficient?