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Style for Group-internal Drafts

This Guidebook is the collected wisdom of the W3C Group Chairs and other collaborators.

Status of this Document

This document, for W3C groups, reflects some discussion within the Team about how groups can avoid confusion between their internal publications and formal W3C Technical Reports.

Introduction

Many Working Groups publish drafts for internal group review between publications on the TR page; please review the Working Group "Heartbeat" Requirement for information about expectations for regular publishing on the TR page.

In the interest of clarity of the W3C process, we request that Working Groups take care that documents are labeled with their true status. Sometimes labels like "W3C Working Draft" are copied from documents that are truly a product of the W3C Working Draft process to documents that are not, or at least not yet.

The guidelines below are intended to reduce confusion between group-internal drafts (some of which are Member-only, while others are public) and published documents that have been through additional W3C processes. Documents that follow these guidelines have no formal standing within W3C.

Guidelines for Group-Internal Drafts

1. Use this style sheet: http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/TR/base.css
2. Use an appropriate label for the document, as in:

    <h1>Architecture of the World Wide Web, 
              Volume One</h1>
    <h2>Editor's Draft 15 December 2004</h2>
   

3. When the document is "Member-confidential", indicate this in an obvious place at the top of the document. Please also include a reminder in the status section.
4. Set expectations about the stability and level of confidentiality of the document in the status section, for example:

   This document is for review by the [Group Name] and is subject to change without notice. This document has no formal standing within W3C. [It is a Member-only document.] Please consult the group's home page and the W3C technical reports index for information about the latest publications by this group.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. Can our group publish this type of document elsewhere than w3.org?

Yes. However, please also take care not to publish these drafts on Web sites where the surrounding context (nearby pages, directory paths, etc.) might give the impression that they have formal status within W3C or other standards body.

If you are just attaching a copy of an in-progress draft in email in preparation for a group teleconference, keep in mind that the attachment is archived and may be found by readers who don't have that context. Please erase any indication that this is a W3C Working Draft.