Tools

This article is a stub. You can help the W3C wiki by expanding it.

What are the current tools in active use by W3C groups and participants?

Collaboration

Chat

IRC is used by most groups at W3C as well as TPAC breakout sessions for chatting, queue management (using Zakim), logging (RRSAgent), and scribing to make minutes (also RRSAgent)
Slack — W3C has a Slack community at: https://w3ccommunity.slack.com/
- Request an invitation to join: https://www.w3.org/slack-w3ccommunity-invite

Collaborative documents

Etherpad for realtime collaboration, notes, minutes: https://pad.w3.org/
Wiki: This wiki for more persistent and web search indexed information collection, organizing, and discovery, as well as collaborative archiving of minutes, corrections, and errata

W3C Web Services

W3C maintains a number of web-based tools that web developers can use in their browsers:

Validators:

HTML validator: https://validator.w3.org/
- Link checker: https://validator.w3.org/checklink
CSS Validator: https://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
RSS/Atom feed validator: https://validator.w3.org/feed/

Other services:

HTML differences visualizer: https://services.w3.org/htmldiff
- Compares two HTML documents and shows additions, deletions, and changes

Advanced:

⚠️ "comma" tools: https://www.w3.org/,tools

W3C Spec Publishing

Tools for publishing W3C specs:

Bikeshed generator: https://api.csswg.org/bikeshed/ web UI
- cURL endpoint: see Using Curl docs
- before you publish to TR, be sure to set these two properties in the metadata block at the top:
  - Status: NOTE
    - "NOTE" is the simplest example, see doctypes.kdl for others.
  - Prepare for TR: true
- then reset it back after publishing succeeds (per results from Echidna below):
  - Status: NOTE-ED
    - "NOTE-ED" is the simplest for this, and a good reminder to switch to "NOTE" when ready to (re)publish
  - Prepare for TR: false
Pubrules checker: https://www.w3.org/pubrules/ (AKA "Specberus") web UI
- REST API / cURL endpoint: https://www.w3.org/pubrules/api/metadata?url= (returns JSON, see specberus docs)
Publish to TR with Echidna (on GitHub)
- Docs: manual publishing with Echidna
- REST API / cUrl endpoint: https://labs.w3.org/echidna/api/request (requires form POST, see TAR file example)
  - If your spec is a single HTML doc (no embedded images) you can save the rendered Bikeshed output locally as Overview.html in a directory, then on a local command line in that directory, you can do this to make the .tar file:
    tar cvf Overview.tar Overview.html
- See the Echidna docs for how to do a dry run and check results of a request (the hex string returned from the cUrl endpoint)
  - https://github.com/w3c/echidna/wiki/How-to-use-Echidna#result-of-the-request
  - https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-tr-notifications/ also has [Echidna] email logs for each attempt to publish to TR with one of these in the Subject:
    - [Echidna] ✔️ Success:
    - [Echidna] ✗ Failure:
...

Discussion about spec publishing tools:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/spec-prod

GitHub

GitHub is used for most work on specifications at W3C, including issue filing, tracking, and resolving. See W3C on GitHub guidebook section for help and guidelines about using GitHub and Git at W3C.

Social Media

https://w3c.social/ — W3C run Mastodon instance