Consider marking up editors so tools can aggregate them

[jyasskin]

In https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/spec-prod/2021AprJun/0026.html we're looking at ways to find all the editors working on the web platform. I see that ecmarkup specs can include a list of contributors (https://github.com/tc39/proposal-atomics-wait-async/blob/a641110639807e6a37c2f86827805697c5768237/spec.html#L12, https://github.com/tc39/proposal-class-static-block/blob/7de25839a5671dc1761fc8afb25a616209c12413/spec/index.html#L8), which get propagated to a block at the bottom of the specification.

The list of contributors there isn't annotated in a way that a program can find it. If you look at https://drafts.csswg.org/css-regions/ or https://w3c.github.io/media-source/, you can see how these specs mark up their editors using h-card:

<dd class="p-author h-card vcard"><span class="p-name fn">Jerry Smith</span>
            (<a class="p-org org h-org h-card" href="http://www.microsoft.com/">Microsoft Corporation</a>)
           (Until September 2017)</dd>

In particular, the parsing in https://github.com/w3c/reffy/pull/593 uses the h-card, p-name, and p-org classes to identify the relevant parts of an editor, and it might make sense to use p-author in order to be a bit more independent of the <dl> structure that w3c-ish specs use.

[bakkot]

Are you interested in having

• current editors
• current and former editors, or
• all contributors?

The current editor support is aimed at just the first. And we haven't historically included the organization, although I suppose we could start doing so (although people have changed organizations while editor in the past).

[ljharb]

Additionally, keeping "organization" up to date would be a large chore - I'm not sure why it would be important to know what organizations an editor and/or contributor is no longer employed at.

[jyasskin]

For my purposes, current editors are the most useful. If I'm just looking for editors at my company, I can search our corporate database by name. Having the organization present would be helpful in noticing when someone has spelled their name differently and in double-checking that the search is implemented correctly, but it's not essential.

[ljharb]

For how many companies is it a difficult task to figure out who's a spec editor at your own company?

[jyasskin]

This is lower priority for Google for ecmarkup -- we have a better handle on who edits JS specs than web specs in general, although @syg might correct me. We've definitely lost track of the full set of our W3C-area editors.

I primarily filed this to see if y'all want to integrate with this part of Reffy. A "no" would be fine.

[bakkot]

I'm happy to update to add the classes reffy expects around the list of contributors. Since we're not already tracking organizations and you say it's not essential I'll just stick with marking up the list of current editors, and not adding any additional information.