W3C Working Group Home Page Markup Introduction

Want to set up an RSS feed for your working group? It could be as easy as adding a profile to the head of the document and class="news" to the <ul> containing all of your news items.

The full explanation of how to get your working group's data into another format where we can use it in interesting applications like At A Glance and a publications calendar is in the Guidelines, along with a useful set of examples and templates; this document shows you where your data might end up and how you can markup your data to get it there.

Tool Listing

RSS Feed, Publication Calendar, Drafts List/RSS Feed, finding discrepancies between the database-backed working group list and a working group's list of participants, finding calendar discrepancies between the Member events calendar and working group event listings, a Last Call announcement tool which includes projected publications, and a graphical representation of all projected publications. Also see plans for future tools

RSS Feed

At A Glance is a prototype for the hierarchical aggregation of news feeds, providing in a quick glance the combined activities of working groups and other relevant information in a grouped and sorted manner. It has the planned capability to separate out public, member, and team news as well as a personal customisation feature set.

To get your group's news into At A Glance, you'll need an RSS feed. If you've already got one, you're set. If not, you can add the following markup to your page:

Example: Generate an RSS Feed

<h3>News</h3>
<ul class="news">
 <li><em class="date">2003-01-10</em> New Working Draft</li>
 <li><em class="date">2003-12-12</em> Beta Implementation Released</li>
</ul>

Read the guidelines for a full description of how you can deal with different news layouts. Don't forget to include profile="http://www.w3.org/2002/12/wg" in your head element!

Deliverables Calendar

The publications calendar aggregates all publications data from participating working groups into a coherent calendar view. This provides W3C management with a good idea of the work groups expect to accomplish, the W3C SysTeam with a good idea of what work they'll have to accomplish, and interested parties with an idea of where W3C publications are headed.

To get your group's data into the calendar, you'll need to markup your group's deliverables; here's an excerpt from the QA working group's roadmap - note that the markup must delimit each document's location or title (and expected date if relevant) to be in the calendar:

Example: Deliverables

<table border="1" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0"
 summary="QA Working Group Project Plan" class="deliverables">
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <th scope="col" class="title">Deliverable</th>
      <th scope="col" class="wd">1st draft</th>
      <th scope="col" class="wd">2nd draft</th>
      <th scope="col" class="wd">3rd draft</th>
      <th scope="col" class="lc">Last Call</th>
      <th scope="col">ends</th>
      <th scope="col">CR</th>
      <th scope="col">PR</th>
      <th scope="col">REC</th>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <th scope="row"><a
        href="http://www.w3.org/TR/qaframe-intro/">Introduction</a></th>
      <td class="done"><a
        href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-qaframe-intro-20020201/">1 Feb
        2002</a></td>
      <td class="done"><a
        href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-qaframe-intro-20020515/">15 May
        2002</a></td>
      <td class="done"><a
        href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-qaframe-intro-20021108/">8 Nov
        2002</a></td>
      <td><em>3rd Feb 2003</em></td>
      <td><em>3rd Mar 2003</em></td>
      <td>TBD</td>
      <td>TBD</td>
      <td>-</td>
    </tr>
   ...
  </tbody>
</table>

Drafts List

The markup guidelines are fully compliant with those Bert Bos introduced to generate the list of internal working group drafts and the RSS feed of the same information. You can read his documentation, the guidelines concerning draft markup, or follow the partial example below.

To be included in Bert's draft list, at this time you'll have to notify him of your group's name and the location of the group's drafts list (see his documentation for details). Each draft should have a title and a details link; Bert's tool gets the date automatically from HTTP response header information.

Example: Drafts

<dl>
 <dt class="draft"><span class="date">2002-10-01</span>
   This is the editor's version of the Last Call draft
   for the <a class="title" rel="details"
   href="100102metaml.html">MetaML 1.0</a> specification.
 </dt>
 <dd>
   MetaML does... (this section is parsed as
   the description)
 </dd>
 ...
</dl>

Working Group Participants Tracking

Working group participants will eventually be completely tracked through the database-backed working group (DBWG) tool. The 'diff' tool can help keep working groups' listings of participants synchronised with the DBWG.

To include your group in the 'diff' tool's output, please contact Ryan Lee, ryanlee@w3.org. The following example was borrowed from the Math Working Group's list of participants (with certain privacy modifications).

Example: Participants

<table summary="WG membership" class="participants">
  <tbody>

    <tr>
      <th class="name">Name</th>
      <th class="role">Status</th>
      <th class="organization">Company</th>
      <th class="email">Email</th>
      <th>Dates</th>

    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td><a href="mailto:ron@example.org">A., Ron</a></td>
      <td></td>
      <td>Example Software</td>
      <td>ron@example.org</td>
      <td>June 2001-</td>

    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td><a href="mailto:laurent@example.com">B., Laurent</a></td>
      <td></td>
      <td>Example Communications</td>
      <td>laurent@example.com</td>
      <td>June 2001-</td>

    </tr>
 ...
</table>

Member Events Calendar Comparison

Marking up future working group events can help generate an accurate Member Events calendar. Future dates from listings in each group's page are compared against existing calendar events to determine what might be missing.

See the Patent Policy Working Group's page for a good example of meeting markup. The following is an example of meeting markup.

Example: Tabled Method for Meetings

<table class="meetings">
 <tbody>
  <tr>
   <th class="date">Date</th>
   <th class="agenda">Agenda</th>
   <th class="minutes">Minutes</th>
   <th class="description">Description</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
   <td>2002-10-20</td>
   <td>
    <a href="2002/10/20-agenda.html">agenda</a>
   </td>
   <td>
    <a href="2002/10/20-minutes.html">minutes</a>
   </td>
   <td>
    October F2F in Kalamazoo
   </td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
   <td>2002-11-03</td>
   <td>
    <a href="2002/11/03-agenda.html">agenda</a>
   </td>
   <td>
    <a href="2002/11/03-minutes.html">minutes</a>
   </td>
   <td>
    November F2F in Canberra
   </td>
  </tr>
 ...
 </tbody>
</table>

Last Call Working Draft Announcement

Marking up a projected date of publication for a group's Last Call Working Draft as demonstrated partially in the above publication calendar example will allow the draft to be listed in an email and in an archive of Last Call announcements. The announcement is mostly for those involved in reviewing Last Call drafts, but others may find it informative to follow the state of W3C publications.

Projected Publication Chart by Date

As an adjunct to the Technical Report publication history project, which generates SVG representations of TR data gathered out of the TR automation project, the projected publication SVG is based on working group publication data as described above in the publication calendar example.

Other Applications

People would like to see RDF calendars of data. The Communications Team can probably benefit from news and publication reports. They should all show up here as they're developed.