glossing of asterisks in XHTML 1.1

aloha!

this is a resend of a post that i thought i had sent out several months 
ago, when i asked that the asterisks in the Access Module be glossed, 
but i can't find any record of this emessage actually reaching the 
lists, so please excuse the lateness of the observation, but in the 
document located at:

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/doctype.html#s_doctype

which describes the modules that comprise the XHTML 1.1 Document Type, 
contains several module names followed by an asterisk -- what is the 
purpose of the asterisk?  i could not find any text in the document to 
indicate what the asterisks are supposed to signify, and none of the 
asterisks is glossed with an ABBR, such as:

<abbr title=" mandatory">*</abbr>

please note that the value of the @title contains a leading whitespace,
as there is no space between the module name and the asterisk; therefore,
without the whitespace preceding the gloss the word "Module" would be 
co-joined with whatever the gloss for the asterisk is...

this is the "convention" that i worked out with shane as per the use of
the asterisk in the Access Module to indicate the default state; could 
we port this solution to all of our documents, so as to be in compliance
with WCAG?

shane, if it would help, i can re-re-review all of the 1.1 documents to
ascertain where asterisks are used to convey content...

gregory.
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ADVICE, n.  The smallest common coin.
                    -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
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             Gregory J. Rosmaita, oedipus@hicom.net
  Camera Obscura: http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/index.html
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Received on Wednesday, 26 November 2008 16:15:38 UTC