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At 02:38 PM 2/18/2003 -0800, Gregory Murphy wrote:
>The term "non-normative" is used frequently in XML 1.0 and in related
>specs. What a document means when it purports to be normative is clear to
>me, but when a section is labled "non-normative", I know what it is not,
>but not necessarily what it is.
>
>Can someone offer paraphrase what the specs mean when they use this term?
The reason we divide specs into "normative" and "non-normative" is so that
people know which source to trust if they disagree. For instance, a Working
Group might write a tutorial or a set of examples or a position paper that
contains an error which contradicts the normative specification. The
normative specification is the one you should trust.
Sometimes a Working Group will cover the same material in different ways in
two normative specs. When they do this, they are saying that these two
specifications *must* agree, and any disagreement between them is an error
which must be corrected by the Working Group.
Jonathan
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