Licence & citation
CC BY 4.0Two different things are published here under two different sets of terms: the Institute's own writing, and the bodies of evidence it reproduces from other people's work. Conflating them would be exactly the kind of unsourced claim this building exists to avoid.
The Institute’s own work
Every authored entry — the principles, the failures, the patterns, the specimens, the figures drawn for them, and the framings and groupings applied to the collections — is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Copy it, republish it, translate it, build on it commercially. The single condition is attribution: name the Institute and link to the entry.
Every entry page carries a citation builder in its contents rail — Chicago, APA, Harvard, MLA, the entry's own reference number, and a downloadable RIS record. Each entry has a stable reference (FLR·B·005, PTN·03·004) that does not change when a title is edited.
The collections are not the Institute’s to license
The ground floor reproduces published standards and public datasets. Those carry their own terms, which travel with the data and are not superseded by anything on this page. Each collection states its source and licence on its own page; the register is:
| Collection | Source | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| The lag | W3C ARIA Authoring Practices × web-features (Baseline) | W3C Document Licence · CC0 |
| The pattern register | W3C ARIA Authoring Practices Guide | W3C Document Licence |
| The keyboard grammar | ARIA Authoring Practices, keyboard interaction sections | W3C Document Licence |
| WCAG 2.2 | W3C WCAG 2.2 Recommendation | W3C Document Licence |
| What the law requires | ETSI EN 301 549 V3.2.1; national legal instruments | ETSI publication · public legal instruments |
| The role taxonomy | W3C WAI-ARIA specification | W3C Document Licence |
| The component census | public design-system repositories | MIT · Apache-2.0 · CC0 |
| Standardised nowhere | measured against this site’s own collections | — |
| What a machine can check | W3C ACT Rules × WCAG 2.2 Recommendation | W3C Document Licence |
| What the platform learned to ask | CSS Media Queries Level 5 × web-features | W3C Document Licence · CC0 |
| What a form field may be about | WHATWG HTML autofill × WCAG 2.2 Input Purposes | CC BY 4.0 · W3C Document Licence |
| The keyboard nobody binds | UI Events key values × ARIA Authoring Practices | W3C Software and Document Licence |
| A contract with optional terms | WAI-ARIA 1.2 Recommendation | W3C Document Licence |
| The form that assumes your name | Unicode CLDR person names × Google libaddressinput | Unicode-3.0 · CC-BY 4.0 |
| Where text breaks | Unicode Character Database, LineBreak.txt (UAX #14) | Unicode Licence |
| The error vocabulary | IANA HTTP Status Code Registry; RFC Editor index | IETF/IANA registry |
| Published layout grids | design systems, brand manuals, typographic standards and framework defaults | public documentation · print manuals cited |
| What each tool computes | each tool’s own pages, repositories and changelogs | various · recorded per row |
| Where the screenshots are | each library’s own about, pricing and terms pages | various · recorded per row |
Where a collection is derived rather than reproduced — a join between two sources, or a count made here — the arrangement and the finding are the Institute's and fall under CC BY 4.0; the underlying data does not.
Fonts and code
The typefaces are self-hosted under their own licences and are not covered by this page. The site's source is not currently published; when it is, it will be under an OSI licence and this paragraph will say which.
Corrections
An error in an entry is a defect in the entry, not a difference of opinion. The method page records how this site is built and what it has already got wrong. Corrections are welcome via the director.