Re: Informative components of w3c specifications

Marcos, I do *not* disagree with you, but your statement reminded me of one
of my very early experiences in the standards world. I share it for your
amusement, but it may also change your mind.

I was working on X3J11 (ANSI C) in about 1986? In reviewing a draft, there
was some language that was overly complex and honestly unclear.  I'm a
smart guy and a native English speaker, so I finally puzzled it out.  But
non-native speakers or people who can't readily parse a 100 word sentence
might have trouble.  I proposed a change to basically split up the sentence
and remove some punctuation so there were fewer dependent clauses.

A few months later, when the committee was done processing all of the
change requests, the reply I got was along the lines of "Thank you for your
comment.  Your proposed change is rejected.  A complete reading of the
standard would render full understanding of this issue".

In other words, if I read the entire document, I would have known what that
section meant.  I didn't need to be reworded.

People don't read the entire document.  Other documents link into our specs
- to sections that have normative text and embedded notes.  I am as lazy as
the next guy. I am not going to scroll up to the conformance section to see
whether notes are by default informative in the spec I am reading at the
moment.  I'm just not.


On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 9:46 AM, Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com> wrote:

>
>
>
> On Friday, July 11, 2014 at 10:35 AM, Joseph Scheuhammer wrote:
>
> > Something like this:
> >
> > <div role="note" class="note">
> > <div class="note-title" aria-level="3" role="heading" id="h_note_3">
> > <span>Note (informative) </span>
> > </div>
> > <p>
> > Refer to the ... for the rules in this section.
> > </p>
> > </div>
> >
>
>
> I would object to that. Let's please not bloat specs further (specially
> with Respec). Specs clearly state in their conformance sections that:
>
> "As well as sections marked as non-normative, all authoring guidelines,
> diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative.
> Everything else in this specification is normative."
>
>
>
>