Re: Normative vs. non-normative references

On Thursday 24 January 2002 11:19, Norman Walsh wrote:
> I note that the PR draft of xmldsig-core makes no distinction in the
> references section between normative and non-normative references.
>
> In the absence of the distinction, are they all normative or
> non-normative?

Hello Norman,

I remember once asking if there was a normative definition of normative. 
(This certainly came up in questions of dependencies between 
specifications.) Regardless, never saw anything in writing and a convention 
for the W3C has yet to appear [1] though some WGs use the distinction. 
However, I've found the context of the reference to be more useful than 
this distinction in a bibliography and most of our references are normative 
(in that the import meaning/protocol/procedure necessary for xmldsig 
conformance). Quickly eyeballing them I'd say everything is normative 
except for:

Informative: read for interesting context/background
[ABA,RDF,SOAP,XHTML1.0,XLink,XML-Japanese] 

Important: I expect you should read if you're going to be capable of 
implementing the spec but no meaning is imported.
[DOM,SAX,LDAP-DN]

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/06/manual/#References


-- 

Joseph Reagle Jr.                 http://www.w3.org/People/Reagle/
W3C Policy Analyst                mailto:reagle@w3.org
IETF/W3C XML-Signature Co-Chair   http://www.w3.org/Signature/
W3C XML Encryption Chair          http://www.w3.org/Encryption/2001/

Received on Thursday, 24 January 2002 15:32:48 UTC