Starter products: Editing

Non-normative starter-product guidance (RFC 0078). Not part of the standard.

This page moved verbatim from UW Protocol §V.1, §V.5 and §V.6, and from the retired Tier-2 Editor requirements (Protocol 2.x §II.2), under RFC 0078 (D3). Section numbers and headings are kept so existing references still find the text; relative links were re-based to this directory and nothing else changed. The requirement keywords below (MUST, SHOULD, MAY) describe how the reference starter products behave and what a tool must do to stay compatible with them. They are not conformance requirements of the standard, and a conforming Reader or Verifier owes none of them.

II.2 Tier 2 — Editor

A Tier-2 Editor MUST satisfy all Tier-1 requirements, and additionally:

1. Round-trip preservation: bytes outside the modified region of the file MUST be preserved, modulo line-ending normalization.
2. Honor BUILTIN_EDIT_POLICIES (§V.3) — supersede vs replace.
3. Update _meta on every write per §V.4 (new version, new timestamp, correct actor and source).
4. Update frontmatter.last_modified on every write.
5. Reject any EditOperation whose meta.source is not permitted by policy with a ProtocolError of category edit.

V.1 Round-trip preservation

A Tier-2 Editor receiving an .uwx.md and returning an .uwx.md MUST preserve bytes outside the directly-modified region, modulo:

• Line-ending normalization (CRLF → LF is permitted).
• Trailing-whitespace stripping is permitted.
• Reordering of frontmatter keys is NOT permitted.
• Reformatting JSON inside untouched fence blocks is NOT permitted.

V.5 Multi-variant edits

For sections with multi_variant: true, edits MUST specify a variant key. Operations against missing variants create a new variant; operations against existing variants follow the same replace/supersede policy as single-variant sections.

V.6 Frontmatter update rules

uw_version, deal_id, and created MUST NOT be modified by post-init edits. last_modified MUST be updated on every write.