The W3C Quality Assurance Working Group has published a new public working draft of the QA Framework: Specification Guidelines. According to the abstract, "Much effort goes into writing a good specification. It takes more than knowledge of the technology to make a specification precise, implementable and testable. It takes planning, organization, and foresight about the technology and how it will be implemented and used. The goal of this document is to help W3C editors write better specifications, by making a specification easier to interpret without ambiguity and clearer as to what is required in order to conform. It focuses on how to define and specify conformance for a specification. Additionally, it addresses how a specification might allow variation among conforming implementations. The document contains a set of guidelines or requirements, supplemented with good practices, examples, and techniques."
The W3C Quality Assurance Working Group has posted the second public working draft of Variability in Specifications. "This document analyzes how design decisions of the conformance model of a specification may affect its implementability and the interoperability of its implementations. To do so, it introduces the concept of variability - how much implementations conforming to a given specification may vary among themselves - and presents a set of well-known dimensions of variability. Its goal is to raise awareness of the potential cost that some benign-looking decisions may have on interoperability and to provide guidance on how to avoid these pitfalls by better understanding the mechanisms induced by variability."