On Mar 28, 2016, at 9:28 AM, John Leslie <john(_at_)jlc(_dot_)net> wrote:
Nonetheless, I restate my opinion:
] IMHO, the intent (when 2119 was written), was to define new words
] using ASCII uppercase, not to redefine English words. As evidence,
] I cite the three uses of lowercase "must", four uses of lowercase
] "should", and five uses of lowercase "may", which are a true challenge
] to interpret as 2119 keywords.
well, not quite - it was to make more consistent an existing practice
the use of capitalized words in IETF documents predates RFC 2119 by quite a bit
- see,
for example, RFC 1023. The use became codified by RFC 1122, where the
definitions in
RFC 2119 come from.
As an AD I became frustrated by the number of IDs I was reviewing that used
upper case words
but did not include any statement of what the reader was to make of the fact
that some words were
capitalized. I, and the rest of the IESG at the time, were returning the IDs
requesting that the
authors add some explanation. The explanations that were added were , to say
the least,
inconsistent. After rather many of these I wrote what became RFC 2119 so that
we would at
lets have a consistent explanation of the capitalized words that authors could
use if they wanted to.
There was some interaction on the list that resulted in what is now section 6
of RFC 2119 to
provide guidance on when to use the capitalized words
The wishy washy descriptive rather than proscriptive language in the abstract
was because I,
the IESG and the community were not of one mind to say that the use of such
capitalized
terms should be mandatory - quite a few people felt that the english language
was at
least good enough to convey the writer’s intent without having to aggrandize
specific words.
Thus the abstract basically was saying: if you want to use capitalized words
here is a standard
way to say what they mean - as I recall some RFCs even after 2119 was published
included
their own definitions for the capitalized terms because the authors thought
they had better
definitions.
Scott