Specification Statuses

Final means the specified concepts will not change anymore. You can safely implement this specification.

Anyone — including us — wishing for changes will have to fork and create their own, derivative specification. We may still update the page with presentational and non-normative changes.

Candidate means we have a complete design and first implementation experience, but we want to practically validate it some more before committing to never changing it.

We may still change details as issues arise. In principle, we might even do fundamental changes, but we are optimistic this will not be necessary. We encourage implementation efforts and would love to hear about any stumbling blocks you encounter.

Proposal means we have a complete design which we think should work, but which has not been validated by any implementation work yet.

There will probably be changes unless we got it right the first time. If we got it really wrong, there may be fundamental changes. While we would be delighted by outside implementation efforts and reports of stumbling blocks, we will happily save you the effort.

We keep a changelog and RSS feed of all changes to Candidate specifications here.