Official Documentation Standards
The Sxnnyside Project
This repository is the single source of truth for documentation standards across all Core Red projects.
The standards defined here are normative. They are not guidelines, suggestions, or aspirational goals. They are mandatory requirements that govern how documentation is written, structured, and maintained within every Core Red repository.
No project-level documentation may contradict the standards defined in this repository.
Projects may extend these standards to address domain-specific requirements. Extensions must not weaken, override, or reinterpret any standard established here. In the event of conflict between a project-level document and this repository, this repository prevails.
These standards apply to:
- All public repositories under the Core Red organization
- All private repositories under the Core Red organization
- All documentation artifacts produced within Core Red projects
This includes, but is not limited to: README files, security policies, contributing guides, architecture documents, configuration references, and any file whose purpose is to communicate project information to an internal or external audience.
Documentation is product. It is not an afterthought, a supplementary artifact, or a secondary deliverable. Documentation ships with the code and is held to the same standard of quality, accuracy, and review.
Clarity is non-negotiable. Every statement must be precise and unambiguous. Conciseness is valued, but never at the cost of completeness or correctness.
Consistency is mandatory. All Core Red documentation must be structurally and tonally uniform. Deviation introduces ambiguity. Ambiguity is a defect.
Standards evolve; they do not destabilize. Changes to these standards follow a controlled, versioned process. No standard is modified without justification, review, and explicit version increment.
All Core Red projects must comply with the mandatory standards defined in this repository. Compliance is assessed at the repository level.
A project is non-compliant if any of the following conditions are true:
- A mandatory document is absent
- A mandatory document deviates from its corresponding standard in structure, tone, or content
- Any documentation artifact contradicts the tone, terminology, or formatting rules defined here
Non-compliance must be resolved before release.
These standards are versioned under semantic versioning. The current version is defined in STANDARD_VERSION.md.
All Core Red projects must reference the version of the standards they implement.
Core Red Standards — Maintained by the Sxnnyside Project.