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[Eliot Kimber]

I think there may be a misunderstanding about what is doing the conforming here. The statement in question is whether or not the DTDs, the XSDs, or the prose of the Language Reference define what the conformance rules *are*, not whether or not the TC-provided DTDs or XSDs conform to the DITA-defined rules for DTDs (they do, and they must, and if they don't, it's a bug and needs to be fixed, or the conformance rules need to be relaxed). What the 1.1 spec said, and the 1.2 spec should continue to say, is that when there is a difference between the rules defined by the DTDs and the rules defined by the corresponding XSDs, the DTDs are taken to be the authority. I think we are (or have) or its propsed that we add, an additional statement to the effect that the prose of the standard is the first and highest authority and if either the DTDs or XSDs differ from what the prose says, the prose is taken to be correct. This is primarily to cover cases where a given constraint cannot be expressed declaratively in a DTD or XSD (or whatever formal constraint specification we happen to use), since the presumption is that all rules will otherwise be consistently expressed. Again, if there is a out and out conflict between what the prose says and what the DTDs say, then there is a bug in one or the other, but until the bug is fixed, the prosed is presumed to be correct. For example, if the prose says "you can have zero or more foos" and the DTD requires at least one foo, until the prose is corrected (assuming it's wrong in this example), a document with zero foos is, by definition, a conforming document for this particular rule. Cheers, E. On 1/13/10 4:37 PM, "Bruce Nevin (bnevin)"