solid/specification

Purpose and delivery model

This is a document repository for W3C Solid Community Group Technical Reports: normative specifications, primers, ecosystem material, and archived releases. It has no application runtime or build pipeline visible in the tree; HTML/CSS documents are published as static web resources under solidproject.org.

Publication entry points

The Technical Report landing page is index.html; individual current reports are root-level HTML files, notably protocol.html, wac.html, acp.html, oidc.html, notifications-protocol.html, and sai.html. These are the primary publication-facing entry points and link the Solid protocol family together.

Protocol specification track

The core specification is maintained in three publication states:

• Current/latest: protocol.html

• Editor’s draft: ED/protocol.html

• Dated persistent releases: 2024/protocol-20240512.html, with older snapshots in 2021/protocol-20211217.html and 2022/protocol-20221231.html.

The same pattern applies to Web Access Control: wac.html, 2024/wac-20240512.html, and historic releases. This separation is the principal stability boundary: root documents evolve, ED/ holds draft material, and year directories preserve immutable citations.

Access control and identity specifications

Authorization and identity-related reports are independently published documents: Access Control Policy (acp.html, 2022/acp-20220518.html), Web Access Control (wac.html), and OpenID Connect guidance (oidc.html, oidc-primer.html, 2022/oidc-20220328.html). These define interoperable external boundaries with Solid servers, authorization systems, and OIDC identity providers rather than executable integrations.

Notifications and subscriptions

Notification protocols are represented as separate report tracks: notifications-protocol.html, notification-subscription-types.html, and websocket-subscription-2021.html, with dated publication copies such as 2024/notifications-protocol-20240512.html. They describe client/server notification and WebSocket subscription interfaces; no service implementation is present here.

SAI and supporting report families

The newer Solid Application Interoperability material is published through sai.html and two focused primers: sai-primer-application.html and sai-primer-authorization-agent.html, with a persistent snapshot at 2025/sai-20250925.html. Supporting ecosystem and quality content is exposed via ecosystem.html, ED/qa.html, and protocol.timemap.html / wac.timemap.html, the latter providing version-history navigation.

Governance record

Meeting notes form the project’s decision and coordination history, organized as dated Markdown records under meetings/, beginning with files such as meetings/2020-04-03.md and continuing through scheduled/current records. Contribution and participation boundaries are documented in CONTRIBUTING.md, while meetings/README.md and meetings/template.md establish the meeting-record convention.