`<draft-comment>`

A draft comment is content that is intended for review and discussion, such as questions, comments, and notes to reviewers. This content is not intended to be included in production output.

Rendering expectations

By default, processors SHOULD NOT render <draft-comment> elements. Processors SHOULD provide a mechanism that causes the content of the <draft-comment> element to be rendered in draft output only.

Content model

Contained by

<abstract>, <alt>, <b>, <body>, <bodydiv>, <cite>, <data>, <dd>, <ddhd>, <desc>, <div>, <dt>, <dthd>, <em>, <entry>, <example>, <fallback>, <figgroup>, <fn>, <i>, <keyword>, <li>, <line-through>, <lines>, <linkinfo>, <linktitle>, <lq>, <navtitle>, <note>, <overline>, <p>, <ph>, <pre>, <q>, <searchtitle>, <section>, <shortdesc>, <sli>, <stentry>, <strong>, <sub>, <subtitle>, <sup>, <term>, <title>, <titlealt>, <titlehint>, <tt>, <u>, <xref>

Zero or more of the following

Contained by

Inheritance

- topic/draft-comment

The <draft-comment> element is a base element type. It is defined in the topic module.

Attributes

The following attributes are available on this element: universal attributes and the attributes defined below.

@author: Designates the originator of the draft comment.
@disposition: Specifies the status of the draft comment.
@time: Specifies when the draft comment was created.
Draft comment: robander 19 May 2026
What format is time supposed to be? We've never specified here, but reviewers have asked. Can we recommend ISO (or specifically RFC 3339) date format, and if so, can we update the example below to use it?
TO RESOLVE: I would like to update the example to use YEAR-MONTH-DAY, such as 2026-05-19. Need to ask TC if we can recommend that overall. I do not want to actually put any limitation on it, I see no reason to break existing usage in 1.x with the upgrade to 2.0 (including the usage across our spec draft comments). But in that case it might also be good to clarify that RFC-3339 is recommended but any other date format is valid. In that case we would need to add it to our references as well.

For this element, the @translate attribute has a default value of no.

The following attributes are available on this element: universal attributes and the attributes defined below.

@author: Designates the originator of the draft comment.
@disposition: Specifies the status of the draft comment.
@time: Specifies when the draft comment was created.
Draft comment: robander 19 May 2026
What format is time supposed to be? We've never specified here, but reviewers have asked. Can we recommend ISO (or specifically RFC 3339) date format, and if so, can we update the example below to use it?
TO RESOLVE: I would like to update the example to use YEAR-MONTH-DAY, such as 2026-05-19. Need to ask TC if we can recommend that overall. I do not want to actually put any limitation on it, I see no reason to break existing usage in 1.x with the upgrade to 2.0 (including the usage across our spec draft comments). But in that case it might also be good to clarify that RFC-3339 is recommended but any other date format is valid. In that case we would need to add it to our references as well.
@translate: For this element, the @translate attribute has a default value of no.

Example

This section is non-normative.

The following code samples shows how a content developer can use a <draft-comment> element to pose a question to reviewers. Note that the @author and @time attributes are used to provide information who created the draft comment and when it was created.

<draft-comment author="EBP" time="23 May 2017">
  <p>Where's the usage information for this section?</p>
</draft-comment>

Processors might render the information from the highlighted attributes at viewing or publishing time. Authors might use the value of the @disposition attribute to track the work that remains to be done on a content collection.