The wording of the "Important" section on [1] is somewhat unclear.

The history behind this text may show something different but AIUI what its talking about is if 'app.ear' is not deployed, the presence of the xml described in this section in 'framework.ear' will not prevent the server from attempting to deploy framework.ear. The server will attempt to deploy framework.ear, and it will fail.

Reading the existing text I can come to the interpretation I listed above, so it's not wrong. But I had to think fairly hard to reach it and a non-expert might not get it at all.

[1] https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_jboss_enterprise_application_platform/7.3/html/configuration_guide/deploying_applications#control_order_deployments