ECMA-427 2nd Edition

The ECMA-427 2nd Edition standard has been approved by Ecma Technical Committee 54 (TC54). It is pending approval by the Ecma General Assembly in December 2026.

The content of ECMA-427 is a subset of the overall PURL specification but its content defines the normative standard. Some elements of the specification that are not currently included in ECMA-427 are the How-to guides, the PURL Test Schema, the PURL test cases, and the data for registered PURL type definitions.

A reference to the "PURL standard" is always a reference to ECMA-427. A reference to the "PURL specification" may refer to information from ECMA-427 or from the broader PURL specification which is maintained in the purl-spec repository on GitHub.

The key elements of ECMA-427 2nd Edition are:

• Introduction: This text is also available on this website as the Introduction above.
• Clause 1 - Scope: This Clause is a brief statement of the ECMA-427 scope.
• Clause 2 - Conformance: This Clause defines conformance to the PURL standard.
• Clause 3 - Normative References: This Clause lists 5 external documents that are normative references for the PURL standard.
• Clause 4 - Overview: This Clause is a non-normative overview of the PURL standard.
• Clause 5 - Package-URL Specification: This Clause is the normative definition of the PURL standard.
• Clause 6 - Package-URL Type Definition Schema: This Clause is a human-friendly version of the JSON schema.
• Annex A - PURL Type Definition Schema: This normative Annex provides a copy of the PURL Type Definition Schema: purl-type-definition.schema-1.1.json in JSON format.
• Annex B - Recommended qualifiers: This informative Annex documents PURL qualifiers that may be used across many PURL type definitions.
• Annex C - ABNF Grammar: This informative Annex documents the Augmented Backus-Naur Form (ABNF) grammar for PURL strings.

The ECMA-427 standard is maintained in the ECMA-427 repository on GitHub.