Re: SHOULD and RECOMMENDED

In English as it is commonly spoken "recommended," and "should" do 
indeed mean different things. Arguably it's unfortunate that 2119 
conflated them, but that's the landscape we're living in.
So if the question is, "How do we improve the normative language in 
RFCs?" we should probably be thinking along the lines of giving more 
details about the conditions related to the things should/recommended 
apply to. I think it was Brian that said a while back that there should 
never be a SHOULD in a doc without an accompanied "unless ..." that 
spells out when the SHOULD can safely not be followed. It's not hard to 
imagine a similar guideline for "RECOMMENDED, because ..." that explains 
why something is recommended, and ideally also spells out the 
consequences if it is not done.
The idea being that 10 years from now a document can stand on its own as 
the repository of information about the topic it describes without 
having to fall back on WG discussions, anecdotes, etc. Another way to 
look at it is to ask the question, "Does this document have everything 
necessary for someone to create an interoperable implementation from 
scratch?"
thoughts?

Doug