RE: [xtm-wg] What are the definitions of "informative" and "norma tive"?

["Mason, James David (MXM) " <mxm@ornl.gov>]

The language comes from the ISO Directives. A "normative" passage is
something that actually standardizes something (France and Germany, for
example, use the term in the name of their national standards bodies, like
Deutches Institut für Normung, the counterpart of American National
Standards Institute). Informative means what it says. It might be useful
information, but it can't be enforced. The terminology is usually applied to
annexes/appendices of standards; some are informative only, some may be
normative. The body of a standard is, of course, generally normative. 

Look, for example, at SGML. There's a big gob of annexes, most of which are
informative. Only K is normative: it's the enabler for XML; L, which gives
the SGML Declaration for XML is only informative because that Declaration
belongs to the W3C and not to ISO.

Sometimes the normative/informative distinction gets obscured. A whole lot
of support has been built for the character entities in Annex D, some of
which has trickled over into HTML and XML, though mostly now people are
moving to UNICODE references. But D was very useful in its day. Annex E,
however had a lot of bad influence (like the primitive HTML tag set).

The W3C tends to say "normative" and ""non-normative" rather than
"normative" and "informative".

Jim

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Sam Hunting [SMTP:sam_hunting@yahoo.com]
> Sent:	Sunday, March 18, 2001 03:01 p.m.
> To:	xtm-wg
> Subject:	[xtm-wg] What are the definitions of "informative" and
> "normative"?
> 
> The subject line says it all.
> 
> OK, standards wonks -- jump in!
> 
> S.
> 
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