Obsolete

How to Write a W3C Technical Report

For now, I'm only concerned with Working Drafts

• Creation of Working Drafts
• File System: Naming, Softlinks, and Updating

Creation of Working Drafts

Karen writes: (15 Nov 95):

As far as I know, the official process by which docs go from W3C Working Draft through the ranks to Technical Report are still being ironed out by Tim and other interested parties.

But I believe I can put almost anything up as a Working Draft if it is put into a common format, and Tim (or someone) OKs it to go up. You can look at the working drafts at: TR page.

It needs to be named with a name/date stamp, as follows: WD-name-yymmdd.html where "name" is a short, one word name to designate the content and yymmdd is the date of this version of the draft. For instance, Dave's HTML3 tables doc is called WD-tables-951027.html. When there are any changes or revisions, a new document is created with a new date (WD-samename-yymmdd.html). This allows commenters to be sure they are referring to the correct version of the document.

Here's my attempt at a step-by-step howto:

1. Contact the director of the consortium to get permission to publish a working draft.
2. Release copyright to W3C???
3. Prepare an HTML format version of your document. We're working on a template. If you can get by with HTML 2.0, please do so. If you may use a different DTD (HTML 3.0, for example) but the document must be a conforming SGML document. If you use something besides the HTML 2.0 dtd from RFC1866, please provide it with your document.
4. You may optionally prepare plain text and postscript format versions of the draft. If you don't provide plain text and postscript, we'll attempt to do it for you. We can only guarantee sucess for HTML 2.0.
5. Submit your draft to the W3C publications editor. Right now Karen is filling that slot, but don't expect her to really know how all this works -- we're still figuring it out.

Suggestions for Making References

To cite an RFC, search ISI's index, and copy the HTML source of the citation there.

(need examples of how to cite: W3C proposed standard, W3C working draft, Internet RFC, Internet Draft, regular web page, online Tech Report, book. Essentially, BibTeX in HTML)

File System: Naming, Softlinks, and Updating

Karen writes: (27 November 95)

Each document needs to be named with a name/date stamp, as follows: AA-name-yymmdd.html, where

AA

is the document type (e.g. "WD" for working draft)

name

is a short, one word name to designate the content

yymmdd

is the date of this version of the draft

For instance, a version of Dave's HTML3 tables doc is called WD-tables-951027.html. When there are any changes or revisions, a new document is created with a new date (WD-samename-yymmdd.html). This allows commenters to be sure they are referring to the correct version of the document.

This timestamp-named document should be placed into pub/WWW/TR/. If this is the first version of the document, you should create a softlink to it called AA-name.html. This is the link which people will follow to get the most current version of the document. If this is a newer version of an existing document, you should update the existing softlink. Don't remove the older versions, because people may need to refer to them as well.

If you are creating a new document, send email to webreq@w3.org asking me to put a hot link to this from the home page. You will need to edit the Tech Report page at pub/WWW/TR/Overview.html to put a link to your document, along the same format as previous documents.