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Thanks, John. Question: Is it common practice for such documents (like BizTalk, a vendor "standard") to make normative references to drafts of emerging standards? If this is common practice, I guess they can do whatever they want and I will unfurrow my brow. W3C WDs (and I suppose, by extension, notes) warn that they are a works in progress and shouldn't oughta be used as reference material. -Mike -----Original Message----- From: John Cowan [mailto:cowan@m...] Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2001 2:11 PM To: Michael Fitzgerald Cc: xml-dev@x... Subject: Re: standards among the IP detritus Michael Fitzgerald scripsit: > Along these lines, BizTalk framework 2.0 spec [1] names the SOAP 1.1 note > [2] as a "normative reference" (section 12.1). I am bemused by this point > of view. What if all companies doing XML development chose from among > "emerging standards" (little _s_) and named them "normative." I think this > is a hazardous practice. "Normative reference" is a standard term used in writing standards. :-) It means that the referring document incorporates what the referenced document says and makes it part of itself. For example, XML 1.0 makes a normative reference to Unicode, meaning that all the Unicode rules are incorporated into XML unless explicitly overridden by XML. It does *not* make a normative reference to SGML, though, so SGML rules don't apply to XML as such. (By other means, we make sure that XML remains a subset of SGML.) -- John Cowan cowan@c... One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore --Douglas Hofstadter
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