A description of the TBX file structure—optimised for AI

Full context if it helps:

Me: You picked up some faults in the Anderson’s work. He made the changes. Can i replace the file. Nothing else changed.

Claude: he fix is confirmed — dstart now correctly says “destination note’s” text element instead of the copy-pasted “source note’s” wording. Good, that’s genuinely resolved.

But this isn’t just that one typo — the diff is 264 lines, not a single-line fix:

Identified which sections changed beyond the dstart fix
It’s more substantial than “nothing else changed” — beyond the dstart fix, there’s a new “Tab and Gallery System” section, a new “XML attribute default values and storage behaviour” section (defining what empty-string vs. not-stored vs. varies actually mean), and the “Critical non-obvious behaviours” section got restructured into definition-list format. Generation timestamp moved from 2026-06-09 to 2026-06-17 — about a week of further work, consistent with Anderson’s “2-3 man-days over 2-3 weeks” description. This is likely the fuller update (dstart fix + content additions), not just the later “one small typo” post.

Worth knowing before I swap it in, but doesn’t change what to do — it’s your file, your download, replacing a reference doc in your own project. Replacing now.

Replace the project reference file with the updated version
Now updating memory: resolving the flagged dstart uncertainty, and folding in the genuinely new content (the attribute-default-value conventions).

Recalled a memory, saved 2 memories
Done. Summary of what happened:

Replaced The_XML_TBX_format.html with the version from ~/Downloads/The XML TBX format.html (found it there once you told me the name — spaces, not underscores, is why my first search missed it).
It was more than “one small typo” — 264 lines of diff, including a fixed dstart/sstart bug (confirming the inconsistency I’d flagged as unverified turned out to be real), plus two genuinely new sections: a “Tab and Gallery System” explainer and an “XML attribute default-value conventions” section that distinguishes four different meanings of “default” (empty-string / not-stored / not-stored-default-unknown / varies) — a real, useful nuance for interpreting any TBX file correctly.
Updated memory accordingly: reference_tbx_schema_content.md now has the resolved dstart note plus the new default-value conventions folded in, and reference_tbx_ai_doc.md records the file swap and why the diff was bigger than expected.
Nice bit of validation on the “flag inferred vs. confirmed instead of guessing” habit — the thing I explicitly declined to assert turned out to be a genuine bug in Anderson’s own document, and he’s since fixed it upstream.

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