Formal SignWriting: Internet-Draft Record and Published Reference

Status of This Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.¶

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.¶

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This Internet-Draft will expire on 1 December 2026.¶

Copyright Notice

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Formal SignWriting models signed text as structured plain text so that Sutton SignWriting [SuttonSignWriting] can be stored, searched, checked, laid out, rendered, and processed by software without losing the written form.¶

Earlier versions of draft-slevinski-formal-signwriting served as public IETF-facing working specifications for implementation and review. Those drafts documented the technical model for Formal SignWriting in ASCII (FSW), SignWriting in Unicode (SWU), signboxes, grammar, query behavior, styling, rendering, and related implementation practice [PriorID].¶

The maintained reference publication for this work has moved to the Formal SignWriting series, version 1.0.0. This Internet-Draft updates the IETF-visible record so that readers, reviewers, implementers, and citation systems can distinguish the expired Internet-Draft history from the current maintained publication series.¶

2. Status of This Internet-Draft

This is an individual Internet-Draft. It is not an IETF standard, has not become an RFC, and does not request publication as an RFC.¶

This document records the IETF-facing history of Formal SignWriting and identifies the maintained reference publication. Earlier versions of this Internet-Draft remain useful as historical technical records, but they are not the current citation target for Formal SignWriting.¶

This document is expected to expire under normal Internet-Draft rules. That expiration does not affect the Formal SignWriting series, its DOI record, its GitHub repository, or the Sutton SignWriting resources that implement the model.¶

3. Relationship to the Formal SignWriting Series

The current maintained reference is the Formal SignWriting series, version 1.0.0, published through Zenodo with a DOI [FSWSeries]. Source materials are available on GitHub [FSWGitHub], and a living web presentation is available on the author's website [FSWWebsite].¶

Readers implementing, citing, reviewing, or evaluating Formal SignWriting should use the Formal SignWriting series rather than this Internet-Draft. Use the series DOI when citing the technical series as a whole. Use an artifact DOI when citing a specific technical paper that has its own record.¶

This Internet-Draft does not supersede, duplicate, or restate the full technical series. It points to the maintained publication path and gives a crosswalk from the earlier Internet-Draft structure to the current series.¶

4. Technical Scope Preserved by the Series

The Formal SignWriting series preserves and expands the technical scope previously carried by draft-slevinski-formal-signwriting. That scope includes:¶

• Formal SignWriting as a plain-text technical model for written sign text;¶
• FSW as the stable ASCII production encoding;¶
• SWU as an isomorphic Unicode-oriented representation supported by Sutton SignWriting resources;¶
• the two-part word model of an optional temporal prefix and a required spatial signbox;¶
• symbols, coordinates, centering, bounding boxes, and signbox structure;¶
• valid token patterns, grammar, parsing, and transformation behavior;¶
• query strings, regular-expression search, and matching logic;¶
• vertical and horizontal sign text layout;¶
• SVG, font, and output-oriented rendering models;¶
• style strings and presentation markup;¶
• libraries, datasets, transformations, and implementation pathways; and¶
• encoding stewardship, stability, forkability, and the boundary between computational validity and linguistic judgment.¶

5. Crosswalk from This Internet-Draft to the Series

The following table maps the major technical areas of earlier versions of this Internet-Draft to the current Formal SignWriting series.¶

6. Implementation and Citation Guidance

Do not implement from this Internet-Draft as the current reference specification. Implementers should use the Formal SignWriting series and the current Sutton SignWriting libraries, datasets, and documentation.¶

Do not cite this Internet-Draft as the current specification for Formal SignWriting. This document may be cited only as a historical Internet-Draft record or IETF-facing transition note. Current citations should use the Formal SignWriting series DOI or the DOI for the specific series artifact being cited.¶

The fact that draft-slevinski-formal-signwriting did not become an RFC is a fact about the IETF publication path. It does not determine the status of Formal SignWriting as a maintained technical model, production encoding practice, or Sutton SignWriting infrastructure component.¶

7. IANA Considerations

This document makes no request of IANA.¶

8. Security Considerations

This document defines no protocol, registry, network service, authentication mechanism, executable format, or wire format. It introduces no new security considerations for the Internet.¶

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