Specref API

Specref is an open-source, community-maintained database of Web standards & related references.

Table of Contents

API
Contributing
Licenses

API

The API to the service is very simple. It supports three operations which are:

Get a set of bibliographic references

GET https://api.specref.org/bibrefs?refs=FileAPI,rfc2119

parameters:

refs=comma-separated,list,of,reference,IDs
callback=nameOfCallbackFunction

returns: a JSON object indexed by IDs

{
    "FileAPI": {
        "authors": [
            "Arun Ranganathan",
            "Jonas Sicking"
        ],
        "date": "12 September 2013",
        "deliveredBy": [
            {
                "shortname": "webapps",
                "url": "http://www.w3.org/2008/webapps/"
            }
        ],
        "edDraft": "http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/FileAPI/",
        "href": "http://www.w3.org/TR/FileAPI/",
        "id": "FileAPI",
        "publisher": "W3C",
        "status": "LCWD",
        "title": "File API"
    },
    "rfc2119": {
        "authors": [
            "S. Bradner"
        ],
        "date": "March 1997",
        "href": "http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt",
        "id": "rfc2119",
        "publisher": "IETF",
        "status": "Best Current Practice",
        "title": "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels"
    }
}

Search bibliographic references

GET https://api.specref.org/search-refs?q=coffee

parameters:

q=search%20term
callback=nameOfCallbackFunction

returns: a JSON object indexed by IDs

{
    "rfc2324": {
        "authors": [
            "L. Masinter"
        ],
        "date": "1 April 1998",
        "href": "http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2324.txt",
        "id": "rfc2324",
        "publisher": "IETF",
        "status": "Informational",
        "title": "Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)"
    },
    "rfc7168": {
        "authors": [
            "I. Nazar"
        ],
        "date": "1 April 2014",
        "href": "http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc7168.txt",
        "id": "rfc7168",
        "publisher": "IETF",
        "status": "Informational",
        "title": "The Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol for Tea Efflux Appliances (HTCPCP-TEA)"
    }
}

Used to get a set of bibliographic references that include the search term in any of their attributes. This is useful to find specs related to a given area of study, specs by a given editor, etc.

Reverse lookup

GET https://api.specref.org/reverse-lookup?urls=http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-FileAPI-20121025/

parameters:

urls=comma-separated,list,of,reference,URLs.
callback=nameOfCallbackFunction

returns: a JSON object indexed by URLs

{
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-FileAPI-20121025/": {
        "authors": [
            "Arun Ranganathan",
            "Jonas Sicking"
        ],
        "date": "12 September 2013",
        "deliveredBy": [
            {
                "shortname": "webapps",
                "url": "http://www.w3.org/2008/webapps/"
            }
        ],
        "edDraft": "http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/FileAPI/",
        "href": "http://www.w3.org/TR/FileAPI/",
        "id": "FileAPI",
        "publisher": "W3C",
        "status": "LCWD",
        "title": "File API"
    }
}

Notice this finds you the canonical version of a spec and not the precise version the URL points to. This is by design.

Aliases

Because of legacy references, case sensitivity issues and taste, many entries have multiple identifiers. Thus an aliasing system was put in place. It isn't that complicated really: an identifier either points directly to the reference object or to another identifier (through the aliasOf property), recursively. All aliases are resolved (there are tests for that) and when you query the API for a reference you always get all the objects necessary to resolve it in the same response. So for example, https://api.specref.org/bibrefs?refs=rfc7230 responds with:

{
    "rfc7230": {
        "authors": [
            "R. Fielding, Ed.",
            "J. Reschke, Ed."
        ],
        "date": "June 2014",
        "href": "https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7230",
        "id": "rfc7230",
        "publisher": "IETF",
        "status": "Proposed Standard",
        "title": "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Message Syntax and Routing"
    }
}

while https://api.specref.org/bibrefs?refs=HTTP11 gives you:

{
    "HTTP11": {
        "aliasOf": "RFC7230",
        "id": "HTTP11"
    },
    "RFC7230": {
        "aliasOf": "rfc7230",
        "id": "RFC7230"
    },
    "rfc7230": {
        "authors": [
            "R. Fielding, Ed.",
            "J. Reschke, Ed."
        ],
        "date": "June 2014",
        "href": "https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7230",
        "id": "rfc7230",
        "publisher": "IETF",
        "status": "Proposed Standard",
        "title": "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Message Syntax and Routing"
    }
}

Which let's you get to the data by using a simple while loop over the response. The contract guaranteed by the API is to always let you resolve aliases.

Now whether you decide to display the result as [HTTP1], [rfc7230], [RFC7230], or even [1] is up to you. Of course, it's silly to reference both [HTTP1] and [rfc7230] in the same specification, but that's something for the editors and/or their tools to avoid.

Obsoleted references

Some entries have an obsoletedBy property which contains an array of identifiers. These identifiers reference specifications that replace this one and can be queried separately from the database.

Like aliases, these identifiers are resolved (there are tests for that), but, unlike aliases, they are not returned with the response to the initial query.

Note that these identifiers can themselves point to aliases or have their own obsoletedBy property, recursively.

CORS

CORS is enabled for all origins. By default the service returns JSON data, which is great but not convenient for browsers that do not support CORS yet. For those, simply adding the callback parameter with the name of the callback function you want will switch the response to JSON-P.

Examples

Some examples should help:

// get references for SVG, REX, and DAHUT
GET https://api.specref.org/bibrefs?refs=SVG,REX,DAHUT

// the same as JSON-P
GET https://api.specref.org/bibrefs?refs=SVG,REX,DAHUT&callback=yourFunctionName

If you need to find a reference ID (for either bibliographic or cross-references) you need to look for it on specref.org.

Contributing

Specref is community-maintained and welcomes contributions! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for detailed information on how to contribute to the reference database.

Licenses

Specref Reference Database (all files in refs/): CC0 1.0 Universal
Code (all other files): Apache License Version 2.0

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