I believe that Brian's interpretation is exactly right. At least, it
conforms to the Original Intent of the
applicability terms MUST, MAY, and SHOULD as defined in RFC 1122. And I
sympathize with
Dean Willis whose head hurts; as one-time RFC Editor I was often
confronted with wildly
inconsistent use of the applicability words. It often seemed that
authors sprinkled them in
randomly, just enough seasoning to make a normative stew.
Bob Braden
. On 1/4/2013 12:03 AM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
On 04/01/2013 05:15, Dean Willis wrote:
...
Either way, I'd like to see some consensus. Because my head is throbbing and I
want to know if it MUST hurt, SHOULD hurst, or just hurts. But I MUST proceed
in accordance with consensus, because to do otherwise would undermine the
clarity of our entire specification family.
This Gen-ART reviewer believes that words like "must" have well defined meanings
in the English language, so shouting is not needed at every use. There are
standards track documents that don't use RFC 2119 at all, and I am not only
referring to RFC 791.
I think the upper case keywords should be used only when necessary to clarify
points of potential non-interoperability or insecurity. I'm quite sure that
I've broken that recommendation quite often, and it will always remain
a judgment call. However, inserting a MUST in every sentence that describes
behaviour is surely going too far. I guess the test is whether a reasonably
careful reader might interpret a sentence incorrectly while writing code;
and if so, would a normative keyword help?
Brian