FYI: Normative vs informative references in the DOM specs.

I was struggling for quite a long time on how to handle normative and
informative references in the DOM specifications. All DOM drafts
are using the same file for external references (bibl elements) [1].

In DOM Level 2, the references were either normative or informative for all
drafts (i.e. one DOM Level 2 draft couldn't reference the spec normatively
and another draft informatively). The only way to avoid this issue was
to duplicate in both section the reference and use two different ids but
I don't find this solution very pretty.
So I modified our spec generator for DOM Level 3 to handle this problem itself.

The editor has now the possibility to indicate if a reference is normative
(<bibref role='normative' .../>) or informative (<bibref role='informative'
.../>).
The default is normative. The script then looks into all bibref elements and
determine the right place of the reference (i.e. if at least one bibref is
normative, then the bibl will appear in the normative section).

My 2 cents,

Philippe

[1] http://www.w3.org/DOM/Group/drafts/level-3-src/xml/references.xml

Received on Thursday, 13 September 2001 17:43:33 UTC