What do TR and CR stand for in W3C drafts?

Question

I have seen it in urls:

https://www.w3.org/TR/MathML3/

I have also seen it on Can I Use

What do the abbreviations CR and TR stand for in a W3C context?

Answer 1

TR (Technical Report) is W3C‘s term/namespace for specifications (or standards), no matter which maturity level they have.

CR (Candidate Recommendation) is a maturity level such a specification can have. See my answer to W3C document states for the other levels, and how you can see which process a specification uses (the latest one is always accessible from http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process/).

Example

Let’s use the HTML5 specification as example, which uses the process from 2005-10-14.

The W3C Recommendation is:

https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/

The Proposed Recommendation is:

https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/PR-html5-20140916/

The Candidate Recommendation is:

https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/CR-html5-20140731/

The latest Working Draft is:

https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-html5-20140617/

As you can see, they are all published in the /TR/ space, and the maturity level can be seen in the last path segment: REC, PR, CR, WD.

Answer 2

TR = Technical Report (a published standard or draft)

CR = Candidate Recommendation (a stage in the standard development process)

Information on the exact meaning of the terms and the different stages in the technical report development process can be found in the source: World Wide Web Consortium Process Document