Re: [www-qa] After the Workshop, still plenty of options to consider

At 01:16 PM 4/11/01 -0600, Lofton Henderson wrote:
>Question.  About #4 below, I'm puzzled by "normative examples".  In my 
>experience, it is common that examples are informative.  Else, you have a 
>normative description and a normative example of the same functionality, 
>and they could be inconsistent.  (Which has precedence if they 
>disagree?).  For reference, in ISO specifications (and in the required ISO 
>document styles), "EXAMPLE:" prefaces all examples and is explicitly 
>connotes that what follows is non-normative (in fact, what follows is 
>further offset by some difference in text style, such as smaller text size).

I would agree with this assessment.  I think where the concern may lie is 
that some may perceive "informative" as "ignore me", which is not the 
intent of informative language.

Using a U.S. Constitutional metaphor, you have the consitution, which is 
really a pretty terse document, given its scope.  You then have the case 
history surrounding the constitution.  The constitution itself trumps the 
case history, but the case history is still very, very important in the 
interpretation of the constitution.

Informative examples are generally intended to bake a little case history 
into the specification itself, and can be very useful in settling disputes 
when there's ambiguity in the specification.  However, allowing the 
examples to be the normative text (thus implying that one doesn't need a 
normative, generalized statement from which the behavior can be derived) is 
a very bad policy to put forward.

Rob

Received on Thursday, 12 April 2001 17:02:34 UTC