Standard Document Format

1Scope

This document specifies the structure, numbering, naming, and publication of a Bureau Standard: a dated, attributed, publicly citable specification published by the Bureau of Applied Science.

It governs the document, not the subject. What a standard specifies is determined by the standard. How it is identified, versioned, addressed, and published is determined here.

1.1Position in the series

This is Standard 0. It is numbered zero because it is a precondition of the series rather than a member of it, and because a series whose numbering rules were themselves Standard 1 would have renumbered on first publication.

Every standard from Standard 1 forward MUST conform to this document.

1.2Why the series is governed at all

A specification does its work by being cited. Citation requires that the identifier, the address, and the section number of a claim remain valid for the life of the revision, without exception and without the reader verifying it. A series that renames, renumbers, or silently edits is not citable, and an uncitable specification is indistinguishable from an article.

The failure this document prevents is slow. Nothing breaks on publication day. The cost arrives when an external document cites BAS Standard 1, Revision 1, §7.1 and the heading has since been retitled.

1.3Conformance language

MUST and MUST NOT denote absolute requirements. SHOULD denotes a recommendation with legitimate exceptions. MAY denotes an optional feature.

2Document identity

Every standard carries three identifiers and no others.

2.1Standard number

Numbers are assigned sequentially on publication, not on drafting. A drafted and abandoned document consumes no number.

Numbers are never reused, never reassigned, and never retired. A superseded standard keeps its number and gains a status, per §8.

The Bureau assigns Model numbers to instruments and Standard numbers to standards. One institution, one numbering habit, applied to two classes of object. No third scheme is introduced.

2.2Title

The title MUST be a noun phrase naming the class of object the document specifies.

2.3Revision

Revisions are integers. A revision that adds optional fields or clarifies existing text is backward compatible. A revision that adds a required element, removes one, or changes the meaning of one is not.

Revision 1 is never edited after publication. Corrections issue as Revision 2. A specification that mutates under a stable address cannot be relied on, and the reader has no way to detect that it has.

2.4Citation form

BAS Standard 1, Revision 1
BAS Standard 1, Revision 1, §7.1

The Bureau MUST NOT mint an acronym for any standard, in a document, an index, a file name, a commit message, or correspondence.

Three-letter codes in every domain the Bureau touches are already occupied, and an abbreviation minted by its author is claimed rather than earned. Standards that survive are cited by number. Nothing is gained by shortening a number.

3Naming

3.1The object rule

A standard specifying a record format is titled <Object> Record Format and published at /standards/<object>-record-format/, where <object> is a noun naming the class of thing the record describes.

Standards of other classes follow the same construction: object noun, then artifact class.

3.2Prohibited name sources

A standard MUST NOT be named for:

3.3Lexicon

Field names, prose, table headers, section titles, directory names, and commit messages MUST use the same words for the same objects. Where a standard defines a term, no synonym for that term appears anywhere in the document.

Vocabulary sets the data model and the reader's mental model at once. Drift in one is drift in both.

4Namespaces

A packet is working material and MUST NOT be numbered as a standard. A document that is not published under the series is not a member of it, and an identifier that implies otherwise misstates what exists.

5Routes

/standards/                              index
/standards/<slug>/                       canonical, current revision
/standards/<slug>/rev-N/                 permanent, immutable

The revision path is written once and never changes. The canonical path advances to the newest revision on publication.

Slugs are lowercase, hyphenated, and derived from the title. A slug MUST NOT contain the standard number. Numbers live in the title and the index; a number in the path would make the path a second identifier for the same object, which §2 does not permit.

Once a revision path is published it MUST NOT redirect, 404, or change content. Superseded revisions remain served, marked per §8.

6Section numbering and anchors

Sections are numbered decimally from 1. Numbering is permanent for the life of a revision.

Anchor ids MUST be derived from the section number and MUST NOT be derived from heading text:

§7.1  →  id="s-7-1"

The section number renders inside the heading and is itself the anchor link.

Headings get edited. Numbers do not. A slugified-title anchor breaks silently on the first copy edit, and the citation that pointed to it lands at the top of the page with no error and no indication that anything moved.

Every section cited by any external document MUST be tested before the revision is treated as citable.

7Document structure

Required, in order:

1. Classification block
2. Title
3. Scope, including conformance language
4. Body
5. Conformance section
6. Revision history
7. License and attribution

The classification block carries, at minimum: classification, document, standard number, revision, date, author, license, source basis.

The page MUST NOT carry a table of contents, sidebar, reading time, share controls, related links, or any element not listed above. The document is the page.

8Status

Three values. No others.

The index carries standard number, title, revision, date, and status. One sentence of scope precedes the table.

A superseded revision MUST carry a visible line naming the revision that supersedes it and linking its permanent path. The reader who arrives by citation arrives at the old revision, and it is the document's obligation to tell them so.

The index lists numbered documents only. A draft has no number and therefore no row. The index carries the scope sentence, the register, the governing line, and the license, and no element beyond them. §7 constrains a standard document; this paragraph constrains the index, which is not one.

9License and attribution

Standards publish under CC BY-SA 4.0. Marks, wordmark, and palette are reserved and are not licensed by publication.

The author is the Bureau of Applied Science. No personal name appears in the byline of a standard.

Share-alike is the operative term. A specification is useful in proportion to how widely it is reproduced, and reserving the marks separates the text, which the Bureau wants copied, from the identity, which it does not.

10Metadata

Required on every standard page:

A standard is written to be found by a reader who does not know the Bureau exists. Crawl restriction on a public standard is a contradiction.

11Publication procedure

Required on publication day, in order, before any outbound correspondence references the address:

1. Publish the canonical and revision addresses.
2. Obtain a third-party capture of each address from two independent archiving services. Confirm both captures resolve and render.
3. Record each capture address and its timestamp in Bureau files.

Two independent third-party timestamps take fifteen minutes and convert the publication date from a claim into a fact. Authorship of a specification is established by the record of publication, not by the assertion of it.

Independence is the operative property. Two captures from the same service, or from services sharing infrastructure, are one timestamp recorded twice.

This document does not name the archiving services, the host, or any other infrastructure. Those are operational choices and are recorded per step 3. A specification that names its infrastructure fails when the infrastructure does.

12Contact

Every standard closes with a contact line naming a single role-scoped address for the series. The address is standards@bureauofapplied.science. It renders in full in the document body as a mailto link, not behind a form, a redirect, or script obfuscation.

One address serves the entire series. Per-document addresses rot, and a reader holding a five-year-old citation must not need a current page to act on it.

The address MUST NOT be a personal name and MUST NOT be shared with general business inquiry.

13Conformance

A conforming Bureau standard:

1. Carries a standard number, title, and revision, and no other identifier.
2. Mints no acronym at any layer.
3. Is titled for the class of object it specifies, per §3.1 and §3.2.
4. Is published at a slug derived from the title, without the standard number.
5. Serves each revision at a permanent path that never changes content.
6. Numbers sections decimally and derives anchor ids from section numbers.
7. Carries the structure in §7 and nothing beyond it.
8. Carries one of the three status values in §8, declared on the standards index.
9. Publishes under CC BY-SA 4.0 with marks reserved and the Bureau as author.
10. Carries the metadata in §10.
11. Completes the publication procedure in §11 before its address is circulated.
12. Appears on the standards index only after a number is assigned.

A document not meeting all twelve items is not a Bureau standard and MUST NOT be numbered as one.