Public reviews of specifications are critical to ensuring their relevance and quality. You can help improve the quality of W3C work through reviews of specifications and charters.

Specifications

W3C groups use public-review-announce, via a notifier, as one means to solicit wide review of publications. W3C welcomes review of specifications from the moment they are first published until just before they are published as standards; see our FAQ entry on where to send feedback.

Depending on where a document is in the standards process, W3C seeks different types of input:

• First public draft: W3C seeks general statements of support and technical feedback, and encourages participation in Working Groups by those interested in developing the technology.
• Last Call: this is a signal from a Working Group that it believes it has satisfied technical requirements, that it has satisfied dependencies with other groups, and that other groups and interested parties should confirm both those points.
• Call for Implementations: this is a signal from W3C that the document is stable enough to gather implementation experience from the community
• Call for Review of a Proposed Recommendation: W3C seeks endorsement of the stable technical report, in particular by the W3C Membership

The Last Call and Proposed Recommendation review periods have announced due dates for review; see the current list of documents in Review.

Deep technical reviews are most appreciated early in the process, although people may spot bugs at any time and provide that feedback to W3C. The W3C Process is designed to promote fairness, responsiveness, and progress. Learn more about requirements on the Recommendation track and reviews and review responsibilities.

Report a Bug

All specifications inevitably include errors, which are revealed over time through usage. If you believe that you have spotted a bug in a specification, we invite you to do the following:

• If the specification is a standard ("W3C Recommendation"), the cover page of the specification will include a link to an errata page. The errata page will tell you whether this is a known bug and if so may list a proposed correction. The errata page should also explain what to do if your bug is not listed.
• For draft documents, the "Status Section" of the document includes information about where to send feedback on the specification.

In general, the more information you can provide to help understand the bug, the better.

Upcoming Charters

As part of the W3C Process of deciding to start new work, the W3C Membership reviews draft charters. At the same time, W3C invites public comment on draft charters; see the archive of announcements of draft charters.