Reference corpus
The specifications the internet runs on
Technical standards in full — the documents that define how systems actually interoperate.
What’s in it right now
Read from the standards bodies' own publication services, including the complete text of each specification rather than an abstract.
Each breakdown is a share of the records that carry that field, counted across the whole collection rather than per shelf — so they do not add up to one another.
What one record carries
- Issuing body
- Designation and revision
- Status
- Scope statement
- Subject area
Every record also keeps the address it was read from, so any answer built on it can be followed back to the original.
What you can do with it
Four things this collection is kept for, and the questions behind them.
Search the actual spec
Ask how something is supposed to behave and land on the paragraph that defines it.
- Full text, not abstracts
- Designation and revision
- Issuing body named
Read the whole document
Full text, not a summary — the detail is the point.
Check behaviour against the definition
Useful the moment an implementation and a specification disagree.
Sits beside your code
Available in the workspaces where the question usually comes up.
The kind of question it is filed to answer.
A specification answers in one paragraph out of hundreds of pages. Holding the complete text rather than an abstract is the only reason that paragraph can be found at all.
And what comes back
- The clause, not the documentThe paragraph that defines the behaviour, out of a specification that may run to hundreds of pages.
- Its designation and revisionSo the answer can be quoted with the document and version it came from.
- The issuing body attachedBecause two bodies can define the same term differently and both be right.
- 01What does the specification actually require here, in the normative text?
- 02Which revision introduced this behaviour, and which one am I reading?
- 03Is this field mandatory, or is it optional with a default?
- 04Which body issued this document, and has it been superseded?
Examples of what this collection is built to answer, not saved searches or results. What comes back depends on what has been read so far.
What it is not good for
known limits- It is not a conformance test. It will tell you what a specification requires; whether an implementation meets it is a separate exercise.
- Where a body publishes only an abstract or a paid document, that is what is held — the full normative text is not there to read.
Where it is used
Code reads this shelf.
The code workspace can read a specification while you work, so the definition is one question away.
Ask how it is supposed to behave
Describe the behaviour in dispute rather than searching for a document number.
Land on the defining clause
The answer is normally in exactly one paragraph, and that is what comes back.
Keep it open while you work
The code workspace can read a specification alongside you, so the definition is one question away.
Read, filed and kept current.
This collection is one shelf of the askFinz index — material read from the source and filed as the kind of thing it is, rather than as undifferentiated web pages. The counts above are read from the running system.