Bikeshed

Bikeshed, a spec preprocessor

Bikeshed is a pre-processor for the source documents the CSSWG produces their specs from. We write our specs in HTML, but rely on a preprocessor for a lot of niceties, like automatically generating a bibliography and table of contents, or automatically linking terms to their definitions. Specs also come with a lot of boilerplate repeated on every document, which we omit from our source document.

The processor can be easily installed and run locally (requiring no network access unless you're updating), or accessed as a CGI without any installation at all: https://api.csswg.org/bikeshed/

See https://github.com/tabatkins/bikeshed#bikeshed-a-spec-preprocessor for more details.

If you get a blank page from submitting the bikeshed webform, then

• go back to the Bikeshed web form - https://api.csswg.org/bikeshed/
• change the “Output” radio button to “Errors & Warnings”
• resubmit to get actual specific errors

If you get an error:

Error running preprocessor, returned code: 1.
FATAL ERROR: The document requires at least one metadata block.

See https://github.com/tabatkins/bikeshed/blob/master/docs/metadata.md for how to create a metadata block for your spec.