Milestones

This document is intended to help Chairs and Team Contacts in planning their deadlines for specification milestones. The tool mainly considers the administrative constraints (publication delays, transition requests, CR and PR review period, CfE, etc.) on the way to REC. These administrative constraints are only a small subset of the overall requirements of REC track.

In theory, it takes around 174 days to move a specification to W3C Recommendation, without open exclusion opportunities. In reality, various requirements from the W3C process may introduce delays (developing the test-suite, waiting for adequate implementation experience to exit CR, implementation report, PR review and objections).

These constraints may introduce much longer milestones than reported by this tool, which provides nevertheless a good starting point for discussion.

• Group Call for Consensus (CfC) to move to First Public Working Draft
  Monday, August 5 2019
• Transition request to First Public Working Draft
  Thursday, August 15 2019
• Publication of the First Public Working Draft, start of the 150 days exclusion opportunity, request for wide review
  Thursday, August 22 2019

  2019-08-24 didn't work out. Picked instead 2019-08-22
   2019-08-24 is in the week end
   2019-08-23 is not a Tuesday or a Thursday
  

• Last day to set the Reference Draft used for the 150 days exclusion opportunity started earlier.
  Wednesday, November 20 2019
• Latest date to request wide review before Candidate Recommendation
  (starts a 90 days review period + 0 weeks to address them)
  Monday, August 26 2019
• Deadline for wide review
  Sunday, November 24 2019
• Group Call for Consensus (CfC) to move to Candidate Recommendation, wide review is done
  Monday, November 25 2019
• Transition request to Candidate Recommendation
  Thursday, December 5 2019

  This transition request needs special steps to accommodate publication.

• Publication of the Candidate Recommendation, start of a 60 days exclusion opportunity
  Thursday, December 12 2019

  This publication must be done without the webmaster.

• Deadline for comments
  Thursday, January 9 2020
• Group Call for Consensus (CfC) to move to Proposed Recommendation
  Saturday, January 11 2020
• Transition request to Proposed Recommendation, showing adequate implementation experience
  Tuesday, January 21 2020
• Publication of the Proposed Recommendation, start of the Advisory Committee Review
  Tuesday, January 28 2020

• Last day of the 150 days exclusion opportunity started from First Public Working Draft
  Sunday, January 19 2020
• Last day of the 60 days exclusion opportunity started from Candidate Recommendation
  Monday, February 10 2020
• Last day of the Advisory Committee Review
  Tuesday, February 25 2020
• Transition request to Recommendation
  Wednesday, February 26 2020
• Publication of the Recommendation
  Tuesday, March 3 2020

  2020-03-01 didn't work out. Picked instead 2020-03-03
   2020-03-01 is in the week end
   2020-03-02 is not a Tuesday or a Thursday
  

Upcoming Moratoria on Publications

The upcoming moratoria on publications are announced on the Chairs mailing list.

• From August 22nd, 2025 to September 1st, 2025 : Limited W3C Staff Availability
• From November 7th, 2025 to November 17th, 2025 : TPAC 2025
• From December 24th, 2025 to January 5th, 2026 : End of Year

Settings

The computation takes into account the W3C Process, the W3C Patent Policy, and the transition requirements. You may tweak the current logic/dependencies depending on your preferences or current publication state:

Hide the First Public Working Draft constraints.

Don't use the W3C webmaster for CR publications, and use the automated publication system instead.

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 weeks to address wide review comments after the wide review deadline before issuing a Group Call for Consensus.

You may use a TR shortname to take into account the history: