the.com/specification

the difference between what you wanted and what you actually wrote down.

means A detailed, explicit description of how something should be made, behave, or perform — the exact requirements something must meet to count as correct.

from From the Latin 'specificare,' to make of a particular kind, built from 'species' (kind, sort, appearance — literally 'a look,' from 'specere,' to see) plus '-ficare,' to make. So at root, to specify is to spell out exactly what kind of thing you mean — and 'specification' is the act of pinning down that look in words. English took it up by the 17th century, and the clipped 'spec' is a modern engineer's shorthand.

latin root
specere, to look — making the abstract visible
missing line
most bugs live in the spec, not code
legal weight
contracts are specs with lawyers attached
the gap
users want outcomes; specs describe behaviors
for instance

html5 specification — web standard maintained by w3c, became official recommendation 2014

the.com · every word