Technical Reports | Guide | Manual of Style
This is the checklist used by the W3C Webmaster for maintaining the W3C technical reports index. Editors and Team contacts should consult the W3C Manual of Style for detailed guidance. Publication requests should be sent to webreq@w3.org (archive) and w3t-comm@w3.org (archive). If you want a Member-visible archive of your request and its disposition, you may copy w3c-archive.
These are the formal publication rules; if you'd like to discuss spec production informally among your peers, and to get the latest tips and techniques, try the spec-prod mailing list (archive).
Contents:
The Webmaster starts by examining the publication request to find the information that will be used to update the tech reports index:
The shortname determines the identifier of the latest version in a series
of documents as http://www.w3.org/TR/shortname
. The
identifier of the particular publication is determined by the shortname, the
status, and the date:
http://www.w3.org/TR/
YYYY
/
status
-
shortname
-
YYYYMMDD
.
Upon receiving a request to publish a technical report, the Webmaster shall make a best effort to check these constraints and, provided they are met, publish the document by linking it from the tech reports index and updating the latest version to agree with this version.
If any constraint is not met, the Webmaster shall decline the publication request, detailing which of the following constraints were not met. See below regarding exceptions to this policy.
Find the date for the title page from the publication request. It must not be in the future; if it is, don't publish it yet. If it's too far in the past then abort and try to get a document with a newer title page date. The editor must not change the document after the title page date.
Editors and Team contacts: if you want to synchronize document's title page date with the actual date the document becomes available in the tech reports index (or with anything else), the editor must negotiate the date with the Communications Team to ensure their schedule permits. Five days advance notice is appreciated; more notice is even better, and experience shows that less than five days is risky.
The form of authorization required varies with the status of the document, etc.:
For information about publications process and requirements based on document type, editors and Team contacts should consult:
Note: in the past, shortnames have been changed between versions, and technical reports have been split and merged between versions. A conservative approach is to treat a merged or split technical report like a first publication.
The Webmaster must have confirmation from the Team contact that the status section includes the following information:
rel="disclosure"
or calling the disclosures file
"Disclosures.html"
helps the pubrules
checker find this link.)The status section may also include:
Please refer to the Manual of Style for more suggestions on status sections.
The Webmaster must have confirmation from the Team contact that all XML namespaces created by the publication of the document follow the W3C XML namespace conventions (announced to the Chairs 26 October 1999).
You may also consult the Manual of Style for more suggestions about document structure.
Note: Serving two formats at the "this version" URI is an assertion by W3C that the documents are equivalent for the purposes of conveying the requirements of the specification. In practice, the Comm Team will not read each alternative to verify that this is the case. If there the Comm Team learns of substantive discrepancies between normative alternatives, the Comm Team may request that the author no longer serve the alternative as normative.
Note: Validate your documents with the W3C HTML/XML validator. W3C serve HTML and XHTML 1.0 documents as 'text/html'.
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
href="http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/TR/W3C-WD" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
href="http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/TR/W3C-CR" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
href="http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/TR/W3C-PR" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
href="http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/TR/W3C-REC" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
href="http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/TR/W3C-NOTE" />
The following requirements pertain to the document head:
<div class="head">
<a href="http://www.w3.org/"> <img height="48" width="72" alt="W3C" src="http://www.w3.org/Icons/w3c_home" /></a>
title
element and an
h1
element.h2
element as follows. The date must be in
Day Month Year order with the month spelled out in full and the year in
four digits.
<h2>W3C status dd Month yyyy</h2>
for example
<h2>W3C Working Draft 03 March 2000</h2>
http://www.w3.org/TR/
YYYY
/
status
-
shortname
-
YYYYMMDDhttp://www.w3.org/TR/
shortname
<p>Please refer to the <a
href="http://www.w3.org/..."><strong>errata</strong></a>
for this document, which may include some normative
corrections.</p>
See suggestions on errata page structure in the manual of style.
<p>This document is also available in these
non-normative formats: <a href="WD-foo-20020101.html">single HTML
file</a>, <a href="WD-foo-20020101.tgz">gzipped tar file of
HTML</a>, and <a
href="WD-foo-20020101.pdf">PDF</a>.</p>
See also <a
href="http://www.w3.org..."><strong>translations</strong></a>.
See suggestions on translations in the manual of style.
For HTML:
<p
class="copyright"><a
href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ipr-notice#Copyright">
Copyright</a> ©2003 <a
href="http://www.w3.org/"><abbr title="World Wide Web
Consortium">W3C</abbr></a><sup>®</sup>
(<a href="http://www.lcs.mit.edu/"><abbr title="Massachusetts
Institute of Technology">MIT</abbr></a>, <a
href="http://www.ercim.org/"><acronym title="European Research
Consortium for Informatics and
Mathematics">ERCIM</acronym></a>, <a
href="http://www.keio.ac.jp/">Keio</a>), All Rights Reserved.
W3C <a
href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ipr-notice#Legal_Disclaimer">liability</a>,
<a
href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ipr-notice#W3C_Trademarks">trademark</a>,
<a
href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/copyright-documents">document
use</a> and <a
href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/copyright-software">software
licensing</a> rules apply.</p>
For XHTML:
<p
class="copyright"><a
href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ipr-notice#Copyright">
Copyright</a> © 2003 <a
href="http://www.w3.org/"><abbr title="World Wide Web
Consortium">W3C</abbr></a><sup>®</sup>
(<a href="http://www.lcs.mit.edu/"><abbr title="Massachusetts
Institute of Technology">MIT</abbr></a>, <a
href="http://www.ercim.org/"><acronym title="European Research
Consortium for Informatics and
Mathematics">ERCIM</acronym></a>, <a
href="http://www.keio.ac.jp/">Keio</a>), All Rights Reserved.
W3C <a
href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ipr-notice#Legal_Disclaimer">liability</a>,
<a
href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ipr-notice#W3C_Trademarks">trademark</a>,
<a
href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/copyright-documents">document
use</a> and <a
href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/copyright-software">software
licensing</a> rules apply.</p>
</div>
hr
) must follow the
copyright.h2
element.h2
element.Please consult the Manual of Style for more suggestions about the document head.
This document arose from January 2000 discussion on the Chairs list, after considerable experience and discussion of How to Write a W3C Technical Report.
Exceptions to these rules may be authorized by the Comm Team Lead or the Director.
Per announcement to the Chairs on 20 Mar 2001, the Comm Team will announce all substantive changes to this document to the chairs@w3.org mailing list. After any substantive change, editors will have a 30-day grace period (starting with the announcement of the change) before the change will be enforced by the Comm Team. During the 30-day period, editors may publish documents that conform to either the old or new pubrules.
The key words must, must not, required, shall, shall not, should, should not, recommended, may, and optional in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.
Related:
20010719: Modified to reflect links to 20010719 version of Process Document.
20020226: Modified to include link to the Pubrules Checker.
20020409: Added Tools section and changed links from How to Write a W3C Technical Report to Manual of Style.
20020424: Added explicit placements for errata and alternative formats; creation of patent/intellectual property declaration linked from Status; existing publicly archived mailing list linked in status
20020925: Provided clarification on patent/intellectual property declaration, removing "counting" language.
20030108: Modified Copyright Statement (changing year to 2003, replacing INRIA with ERCIM, and using short names of all ipr notices.