I read SHOULD and RECOMMENDED as different.
SHOULD is how a implementation ought to behave unless there are special
circumstances (deployment, additional functionality, better idea). MUST
says that there are no circumstances special enough to change the behavior.
RECOMMENDED is closer to a Best Current Practice (BCP); so I might write
"It is RECOMMENDED that the network-converged timer have a minimum value of
2 seconds." but in 10 years, maybe it'll only take 2 microseconds - so
that'll become a bad recommendation!
Alia
On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 4:23 PM, Melinda Shore
<melinda(_dot_)shore(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com>wrote:
On 6/24/13 12:18 PM, Yoav Nir wrote:
- What are the subtle differences in meaning between these two
sentences?
I think "I recommend" is rather clearly different from "you should,"
in terms of strength and (in the case of normative text) obligation.
I don't think that "recommend" is useful in the context of an RFC,
may be confusing and a bit subtle, and is probably best avoided.
Melinda