Steve Yegge once wrote about automating ruthlessly
. When starting to write another post about renting a car in Dallas, I needed to stop and look up something in the HTML spec and I saw the link to the zipped versions of the spec that the W3 makes available. So taking the automation to another idea, why not ‘automate’ visits to websites that I visit frequently? Having a local copy of the HTML spec, the XHTML spec, and the CSS spec would make thing easier to look up when I’m traveling.
Of course I had downloaded and unzipped the file when I stopped and mentally smacked myself. What happens if/when these are updated? I’d have to go grab the newer files, etc etc. What to do? Easy. Subversion rocks, and Tortoise rolls (if you are stuck on windows). And it turns out that the HTML5 spec had a subversion repository, but the older specs don’t.
But you can grab the older specs via CVS, and of course there is TortoiseCVS. With those in hand, looking up details becomes even faster and easier for you when developing. You can grab checkout from http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/.
Turns out I was wrong, you can’t get a checkout of those older specs. Shame.
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