Re: Informative components of w3c specifications

Shane McCarron <shane@aptest.com>, 2014-06-29 17:38 -0500:

> My question is "Are notes *always* informative?"  If not, "Are notes by
> default informative, and should be annotated if they are normative?"  Or,
> alternately, "should notes be required to have a class of 'informative' in
> order to be marked as such?"

For the editors and specs that I work with, the following hold true:

The only sentences in any spec that are normative are sentences that state
normative requirements. And even if a particular sentence doesn't contain
MUSTs or other RFC 2119 language, it can still be normative if it's a part
(subrequirement) of a larger algorithm that's normatively defining a set of
steps or parts of a larger requirement.

But a note is never normative. A note never states requirements and is
never a subrequirement of some larger requirement. Instead a note is just
an informational clarification or aside of some kind. From that it follows
that a note must never contain normative RFC 2119 language. So, if
something that's marked as a note contains RFC 2119 language, then that's a
spec bug that needs to be fixed (that is, it should not have been marked as
a note to begin with).

So there should never be any need to mark a note either way -- that is,
e.g., neither note@class=informative nor note@class=normative are needed.

  --Mike

-- 
Michael[tm] Smith http://people.w3.org/mike