What is the difference between a W3C Working Draft and an Editor's Draft?

Question

I\'m reading XMLHttpRequest Level 2 specification (W3C Working Draft 07 September 2010) but after I noticed that browsers are implementing features described into a Editor\'s D

Answer 1

A Working Draft is a document that has been officially published by the group that is developing it, which means that the members of that group have agreed that it is in a state worth sharing with a wider audience (generally this is for feedback purposes — it certainly does not mean that the participants agree with everything that is in the document).

An Editor's draft is the document as currently being worked on by the person in charge of writing it (the editor).

You can think of it more or less in software terms: a WD is a dot release, or at the very least a tag, while an ED is the absolute freshest version from the latest commit.

Deciding whether one should look at a WD or an ED depends largely on the culture of the group that is working on that specification. In this case with the WebApps group, it is better to look at the ED since it is far more likely to reflect the current fast-moving thinking that goes on on the mailing list. The same tends to apply to other groups that develop APIs.

A word of caution: before a specification has been implemented and shipped, it is just a specification. You should be very careful not to infer from it that various vendors participating in the group will be implementing it as is, or even at all. The purpose of making specifications available early, while they are being developed, is to gather the broadest possible feedback — not to make any form of promise (at least not before they reach a maturity level higher than WD).