Jason Porter pointed out that 12.3 says: "The container determines which alternatives, interceptors and decorators are enabled, according to the rules defined in Sec- tion 5.1.2, “Enabled and disabled beans”, Section 9.4, “Interceptor enablement and ordering” and Section 8.2, “Decorator enablement and ordering”, taking into account any >>><enable><<<<, <interceptors> and <decorators> declarations in the beans.xml files, and registers the Bean and ObserverMethod objects:" Elsewhere the spec still talks about <alternatives>, so I think this is a typo in the spec? https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/WELD-323