Re: Informative components of w3c specifications

why not make it a preference so it can be turned on if the editor of the
spec wants to make use of it?

--

Regards

SteveF
HTML 5.1 <http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/>


On 11 July 2014 15:53, Shane McCarron <shane@aptest.com> wrote:

> 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."
>>
>>
>>
>>
>