Status of this document

AFDS 1.0.0 is a project draft. It is not a W3C standard, not a published industry specification, and not on any standards track. Every identifier and field name defined here is stable within this project and unstable outside it.

The project intends to monitor and seek alignment with the W3C Design System Documentation Community Group, Open UI, and future Design Tokens Community Group work. The W3C UI Specification Schema Community Group was previously named as an alignment target. That group closed on 2026-05-21 without publishing a schema, so its charter is now read as a requirements input rather than as a vocabulary to align to.

This document supersedes AFDS-PACKAGE-FORMAT.md, whose normative content is now Part IV. That supersession is complete, and the earlier document is retained only as a pointer to this one.

Normative and informative material

Clause 4, clause 5, and Parts II and IV are normative.

Part III is normative only for a package that claims the relevant method profile, and has no force over a package that does not.

Clause 1, clause 2, clause 3, clause 6.2, and the annexes are informative. They explain why the normative clauses say what they say. Nothing in them creates a requirement, and a package cannot fail to conform by disagreeing with them.

Organisation

The document is one specification in four parts.

Part I, clauses 1 to 6, states what an AFDS is, why it exists, the model it assumes, how conformance works, and the terms and references the rest of the document depends on.

Part II defines the component contract: what a component declares, how its semantics and behaviour are constrained, and the records that make a declaration checkable.

Part III defines the method profiles, which carry this project's own choices about layout, reflow, colour, typography, and the component catalogue.

Part IV defines serialisation: the container, the two root artefacts, the verification algorithm, security requirements, adapters, profiles, and versioning.

Clause numbers are global and permanent within a version. Clause 23 is clause 23 wherever it is rendered, so a citation never has to name a part or a page. When this document is published as a set of web pages, each clause carries a stable anchor derived from its number, and the split into pages carries no meaning.