On 29 Jan 2022, at 10:14, Frank Steimke <f-steimke@b...> wrote:

It is true that the quoted sentence presupposes a basic understanding on the part of the reader of what is meant by "version number". But without this basic understanding the whole specification would have no meaning at all.

After all, the sentence is normative. For what reason does the XML specification make statements about permissible values of the attribute if it is completely unclear what its semantic should be?

Greetings,

Frank

Am 29.01.22 um 10:53 schrieb Michael Kay:

On 29 Jan 2022, at 09:37, Frank Steimke <f-steimke@b...> wrote:

Section 2.8 Prolog and Document Type Declaration Production Rule 26 VersionNum together with the following note, which explains the semantic of VersionNum as a decimal Number:

"Even though the VersionNum production matches any version number of the form '1.x', XML 1.0 documents SHOULD NOT specify a version number other than '1.0'."

Greetings,

Frank

That doesn't say anything about the semantics of the version number, it just gives some constraints on its value. It doesn't say what information it conveys: for all this sentence says, VersionNum tells you the number of phone calls made on an average day by the document author.

Michael Kay

Saxonica