34.10. How a document declares conformance🔗

A document answers to the template by declaring where it addresses each rubric, through two channels with different guarantees. A declaration site is the @[rubric "M12"] attribute on a real declaration, applied from a separate module the way the requirement annotations are; because it attaches to a declaration, a site cannot name one that does not exist, and a rename is a compile error. A section site names the tag of the section that states the rubric; the conformance matrix renders it as a cross-reference, so a dangling tag is a render error.

Every rubric requires a section site, whatever its evidence kind. The template is a claim about a document, so a rubric discharged only by a declaration is one the document never mentions, and reporting that as addressed would be the false green the whole arrangement exists to prevent. What the evidence kind adds is whether a declaration is required as well: for everything but exposition, it is.

A rubric with sites in some but not every required channel therefore reads partial rather than passing, and it does so in both directions. A generated view cited by section with no generator named is a hand-maintained table claiming to be a live one; a theorem annotated with no section citing it is a green declaration the document is silent about. Both are the case a single "done" would hide.

The status of each rubric is therefore computed from the sites and the rubric's own evidence kind. There is no switch to forget to flip, and the worked instance of the whole arrangement is soil-moisture-model's technical reference, whose conformance matrix is generated this way against this template.

One limit of that computation is worth stating where an author will meet it. The status asks whether a site exists, never what the site covers. A rubric whose closure is a census can therefore be discharged by a declaration that is not that census — two theorems standing in for a sweep — and no cell of the matrix distinguishes the two. Until a rubric names the audit that closes it and the status requires that audit among its sites, a green cell on a census possible row means the author remembered; the closure table above is where a reader finds out which cells those are.