docs: add informative reference workflow step processing algorithm

[PatStLouis]

Add an informative subsection under Workflows and Exchanges with the exchange processing loop and hooks described in GitHub discussion, plus editorial fixes (grammar, parenthesis) from the issue text.

Closes #596.

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[iherman]

This was discussed during the vcwg meeting on 26 May 2026.

View the transcript

docs: add informative reference workflow step processing algorithm by PatStLouis · Pull Request #626 · w3c/vcalm · GitHub

Patrick_St-Louis: So I will need to review this and make another proposal. yes, Manu.

Manu_Sporny: Yeah, plus one to that. just when you do the algorithmic part down there at the bottom, try to use the O or OLI syntax, it'll do auto numbering for the algorithm and all that kind of stuff. you could probably take this text and run it through an LLM and it'll generate the right format. which I think we do have some other algorithms in the spec.

Manu_Sporny: So you could follow the ones in the data integrity spec. those kind of have the right shape as well.

Patrick_St-Louis: Yeah, that sounds good.

Patrick_St-Louis: So, I will take this on myself and review this. That's why it's still in draft. and that's pretty much going to do it for us. I know Manuel, I think you came in on the call a bit later. I don't know if you followed our discussion about the example for the request bodies and response. were you here when we discussed that?

Patrick_St-Louis: Yes. Yeah.

Manu_Sporny: Yeah, part of it I think the plan was to just simplify it and…

Manu_Sporny: just try to just use ID context and type or something like that.

Patrick_St-Louis: Kind of a minimal and…

Manu_Sporny: Yeah. Yeah,…

Patrick_St-Louis: allow people to extend other things.

Patrick_St-Louis: And to be clear that we explained that this is to allow different data model version which have some minor changes.

Manu_Sporny: with the only addition, this is just a technical thing. the respect OAS plugin could be expanded to kind of describe hey, what we're really talking about here is an object from the VC data model spec. look over there if you want to understand more about what this object looks like. we can add something to that to make it plus one to removing all the extra crust and… Manu Sporny:

Patrick_St-Louis: Yeah. Yeah.

Manu_Sporny: then putting in a simple statement that just points people to another specification. I think that might be a good thing to do. Yeah.

Patrick_St-Louis: Even look at the description here. because I think the credential object right the root level of the property are not going to change. And this was by purpose, right? I remember when we were discussing do we want to return the raw c this credential key, So all of these are kind of protected with this root level property. This seems like a good place to include this or I've even seen which one? Yeah, there's some notes that are added here.

Manu_Sporny: Yeah.

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[TallTed]

Might be worth pushing a commit, to see whether PR-Preview is working again, so that the output HTML rendering can be reviewed...