The mission of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is
to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common
protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability. The
W3C Process Document describes the organizational structure of the W3C and
the processes related to the responsibilities and functions they exercise
to enable W3C to accomplish its mission. This document does not describe
the internal workings of the Team or W3C's public communication
mechanisms.
For more information about the W3C mission and the history of W3C, please
refer to About W3C [PUB15].
This draft of the W3C Process Document is presented for
Advisory Committee Review and adoption by the W3C. This document
has been produced following the W3C Advisory Committee Last Call
review of the proposed update to the W3C Process. It incorporates
changes to Chapter 7 and a proposed resolution of
issue-95.
A Public Issue Tracker and
detailed changelogs
are available.
W3C Advisory Committee Members are invited to send formal
review comments to the W3C Team until 2 June 2014 using the
Call for Review form. To
comment, aside from Advisory Committee comments, send email to
public-w3process@w3.org
(public archive) or to
process-issues@w3.org
(Member-only archive).
This document has been produced by the
W3C Advisory Board
in accordance with Section 12 of the
current (2005) W3C Process.
The major focus of changes has been to clarify obligations, and who is
obliged to meet them, in the process of developing a specification as a
W3C Recommendation or Note. A particular change, removing the Last Call
phase is intended to clarify that Working Groups are responsible for
ensuring that their specification is made available for review and is
actively reviewed at appropriate points in its development by appropriate
stakeholders. This is particularly intended to stop the cycling of
specifications between Last Call (for Patent review) and Candidate
Recommendation, as well as to more generally support methodologies such as
test-driven standardisation, without enforcing a specific methodology on
any group and without losing the overall benefit of W3C's requirement for
"horizontal" review.
Major changes from the currently operative 14 October 2005 Process
Document include
- The Director must address dissenting AC
review comments publicly, 2 weeks before
publication of a Recommendation.
- If W3C closes a Working Group, they must
republish its unfinished work as Notes.
- Errata must not be made normative except by
revising a Recommendation
- New requirements that Working groups should
document known implementation and must
document expected next steps for all publications
- New requirement that Working groups should
publish abandoned work as a W3C Note
- Recognition that Interest Groups may
publish W3C Notes
- Last Call and Candidate Recommendation have been collapsed together.
Some of the requirements are therefore enforced earlier in the process.
- Advisory Committee review now begins at the same time as Candidate
recommendation, but still ends no less than 4 weeks after publication as
a Proposed Recommendation.
- Implementation requirements for passing beyond Candidate
Recommendation are not simply listed as "2 interoperable
implementations", instead a new sections gives guidance on what is
considered when assessing "adequate
implementation experience".
- Instead of relying on a Last Call publication for adequate review
Working Groups need to demonstrate "wide review"
as part of the requirements to publish a spec as Candidate
Recommendation, while leaving them to achieve this as they see fit.
- There is a stronger emphasis (without creating new formal
requirements) on getting review and testing implementation as early as
possible. How to do this is left to Working Groups to determine.
The document has also been converted from XHTML 1.0 to HTML5.
W3C, including all existing chartered groups, follows the most
recent operative Process Document announced to the Membership.
The terms must, must not,
should, should not, required, and may when
highlighted (through style sheets, and in uppercase in the source) are
used in accordance with RFC
2119 [RFC2119]. The term not required is equivalent to the term may as defined in RFC 2119.
Some terms have been capitalized in this document (and in other W3C
materials) to indicate that they are entities with special relevance to
the W3C Process. These terms are defined herein, and readers should be
aware that the ordinary (English) definitions are incomplete for purposes
of understanding this document.
W3C Members' attention is called to the fact that provisions of the
Process Document are binding on Members per the Membership
Agreement [PUB6]. The
Patent Policy W3C
Patent Policy [PUB33] is
incorporated by normative reference as a part of the Process Document, and
is thus equally binding.
The Patent Policy places additional obligations on Members, Team, and
other participants in W3C. The Process Document does not restate those
requirements but includes references to them. The Process Document and
Patent Policy have been designed so that they may evolve independently.
In the Process Document, the term "participant" refers to an individual,
not an organization.