RE: [xml-dev] About "Normative References"

> 
> What does the "normative references" mean? Does the 
> "normative" specially refer to the standards made by W3C and 
> other organizations (like ISO, ITEF, etc. )?
> 
It's got nothing to do with who wrote the spec that's being referenced;
it's to do with whether what that spec says is considered a normative
part of the referencing spec. So for example XPath 1.0 refers
normatively to IEEE 754 for the definition of floating point arithmetic,
and non-normatively to the Java Language Specification for a useful
summary of IEEE 754.

Michael Kay