Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
I DO NOT agree that 2119 is the only source of consequence here.
If a document explicitly states that the term "RECOMMENDED" is to be
interpreted as in RFC 2119, then that really is the only
interpretation, and RFC 2119 does then become the only source of
consequence. This is beyond personal opinions.
Perhaps if I showed Dave Cridland an article on netiquete he could try
to be less patronizing. Unlike some here I do not regard the RFC
series as having divine inspiration.
I'm not claiming it's the traditional meaning of the term, just that
RFCs do tend to be explicit in what they mean by it..
I've no idea how I'm being patronizing, but I'm certainly not claiming
any kind of divine inspiration for the RFCs. I'm merely suggesting
that if a document says "This word means X", we should accept that and
move on.
RECOMMENDED is a very useful term to have. Particularly when writing
specs for middleware.
That's an interesting debate to have, but it has no bearing on what
the term means in the context of documents citing RFC 2119.
For what it's worth, I entirely agree that a term with force somewhere
between MAY and SHOULD would be very useful in some cases, but in
general we can work around this, such as saying "implementations are
encouraged to use channel binding", or some such.
The IETF document describing use of the term is WRONG it needs to be
corrected. Any corrections would only apply to new specs that
reference the new RFC.
It's not wrong, it clearly gives a meaning to the term. That meaning
is not in line with the implications it might have if used in spoken
English, certainly, but it's clearly stated, and used in that sense as
far as I can tell.
Dave.
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