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Re: RFC 2119 terms, ALL CAPS vs lower case

2012-05-16 18:00:24
+1

My view that this is more about the specific issues of documents and not just RFC2119 itself. Sometimes it falls through the cracks. Sometimes a justification or argument is found to show the contrary of what is stated, especially when its uses lower cases or even terms like "choose." Sometimes its just new conflicts of integrated documents where perhaps an augmented RFC attempts to reinforce what the base RFC may have lacked.

In my view, it will help if future I-D and RFC authors begin to have one new section called in chapter 1.0

  1.x - Minimum Compliancy Requirement Summary

Far too often documents have mixed functional and technical specifications, mixed normative and non-normative compliance semantics too spread out and peppered throughout the document making it harder to catch compliance level issues.

--
HLS


Brian E Carpenter wrote:
On 2012-05-16 18:53, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
On 5/16/12 9:58 AM, Sam Hartman wrote:

...
I'll note that  in my normal reading mode I  do not distinguish case,
but even so I find the ability to use may and should in RFC text without
the 2119 implications valuable.

Agreed. But as a gen-art reviewer, I have several times had to ask
authors whether a particular lower case "may" was intended to be normative
or normal English. Authors must be fastidious about this.

Your mileage may (or is that MAY?) vary, but to forestall confusion I've
settled on the practice of using "can" and "might" instead of lowercase
"may", "ought to" and "is suggested to" instead of lowercase "should",
and "needs to" or "has to" instead of lowercase "must" (etc.). I'm not
saying that anyone else SHOULD or MUST use that convention, but you
might consider it in your own spec-writing.

It is indeed very important not to use "may" when it's ambiguous.
"It may rain today" is fine; "you may leave now" is not (I can think
of three different meanings). In RFC2119-talk, "you MAY leave now"
only has one meaning.