2.2.2 Informative Content

Content that is not normative in technical specifications is informative, and it is provided only as a helpful guide to the implementer. Informative content is not essential for implementation and includes the following categories of information:

  • Abstract data models

  • Capability negotiations

  • Examples

  • Implementation-specific parameters

  • Relationships to other protocols

  • Security parameters

  • Versioning

  • Windows-version-specific behaviors

Windows-version-specific behavior is described in footnotes to the main body of a specification. That information is not normative and is provided to support interoperability across multiple versions of Windows Client operating system and applicable Windows Server releases. The following criteria are used to determine whether information is not appropriate in the body of a technical specification and gets placed in a product behavior footnote:

  • The information varies by Windows product.

  • The information concerns an implementation limit for a data structure; for example, maximum entries or queue size.

  • The information concerns a retry interval.

  • The information concerns a retry count prior to returning a specified error code.

  • The information concerns a specific buffer size choice, when other buffer sizes will work.

  • The information concerns loading implementation-specific configuration information from the Windows registry.