Getting early and wide review of a document is very important, yet in practice it can be challenging. This document provides some best practices for getting document review; it does not define explicit mandatory steps.
This page is linked to from The Guide.
Feedback on this document is welcome, preferably by raising an issue or a pull request.
Getting early review and feedback is important, especially reviews from those groups that have identified a document as a dependency and the horizontal groups. It is also important to get review from other stakeholders including Web developers, technology providers and implementers not active in the Working Group, external groups and standards organizations working on related areas, etc.
In Process-2019, the focus is on getting evidence that wide review has occurred.
When you have published a First Public Working Draft, you should work through available "self-review" materials and request review of your results in at least the following areas. Long enough before you request a transition to CR, you should do the same again, identifying substantive specification changes since the first review.
The meaning of "Long enough" depends on how many changes there are, how clearly you have explained them, and how much discussion is needed to resolve issues. Pointing to 14 concise points for a small spec means a short time if they are simple fixes, pointing to 900 diffs from commits and hoping people understand them in a 300 page spec means it will take a long time to get review, and potentially a long time to also discuss and agree on how to solve the issues. If you have effectively identified issues for review during development and received feedback on them, the review time will probably be shorter. Horizontal review groups sometimes get bogged down; planning in advance is useful.
You should familiarize yourself with the rest of this document. This section is just a quick reminder for when you are in the middle of doing the work.
Among the considerations and best practices, regardless of the type of review (early, thorough wide review, etc.) are:
Recognize that horizontal review groups may be resource limited and may only be able to do one review or may have difficulty scheduling your review quickly. Give them as much time as you can, consistent with asking for review while it is still reasonable to change the technology to accommodate the issues they find.
The Internationalization WG has a series of issue templates that guide you through the information you need to provide when requesting a review. The information that follows is for other HR groups that don't use that approach.
Reply-to: header to the group's mailing listHere are some example RfCs:
Applying these labels doesn't replace the need to schedule a review of your spec at an appropriate time. (See How to Get Horizontal Review above.) Horizontal groups participants can find detailed process information here.
Apply the *-tracker label in your own repository to draw a horizontal review group’s attention to an issue in one of your own repositories. Horizontal review groups may also apply the label if they are interested in tracking a particular issue. Tooling will automatically notify the horizontal group that you attached the label.
If you want some specific advice from the horizontal group, describe that request in the issue thread.
Horizontal review groups may apply the *-needs-resolution label to issues they expect to be resolved before the specification moves to a new maturity level. Working Groups must not remove or add this label (not even when you close your issue).
If the horizontal group believes that an issue with a *-tracker label needs to be resolved before a transition, they may apply a *-needs-resolution label to the issue. Automatic tooling will later remove the *-tracker label.
If you close an issue with a *-tracker or *-needs-resolution label attached, do not remove the label. Keeping the label maintains the tracking if the issue is reopened, but also provides potentially useful information about what was tracked. (Closed issues in your repository have no effect on tools that check for unresolved issues.)
At the end of a review, and before attempting to transition the spec, you should clarify that a resolution is described for all of the issues with a *-needs-resolution label, and check that the horizontal group is aware of those resolutions. You don't have to do this for issues with the *-tracker label. (The horizontal group was only tracking those issues, not expecting a particular resolution.)
As lead technical architect, the W3C Director is tasked (among many things) to assess consensus within W3C for architectural issues and to decide on the outcome of Formal Objections. When a horizontal issue gets flagged as *-needs-resolution and a Group chooses to request a new Maturity level despite the lack of consensus with the horizontal group, it is the task of the Director to assess the issue and the outcome of the request. A horizontal group MAY choose to elevate an horizontal issue as a Formal Objection to elevate further the importance of an issue per the W3C Process.
In the case where an horizontal issue hasn’t been addressed and the document was allowed to move forward, it is recommended that the issue remains open in the horizontal group repository (it MAY get closed in the specification repository unless the Director requests otherwise). Some issues may take years to get resolved, but that doesn’t mean those should be forgotten.
The horizontal groups maintain repositories containing issues that track those raised in the WG repos. Key information about the current state of those tracker repositories is reflected in a set of tracker boards, one per horizontal function. The board points to WG issues and the corresponding tracker issues, and groups issues by specification.
Horizontal groups participants can find detailed process information here.
Abbreviations: