Although I agree with dropping SHALL/SHALL NOT and requiring uppercase,
I'm not sure it's useful to drop REQUIRED, RECOMMENDED, and OPTIONAL.
I.e., MUST/MAY/SHOULD are directives to a person. The others are
adjectives describing the resulting features.
I appreciate that we say things like "X is a MUST", but it hurts
readability vs. "X is REQUIRED".
I'm in favor of retaining those three adjectives.
Joe
On 8/9/2016 1:08 PM, Barry Leiba wrote:
This draft should be self-explanatory -- and please be sure to look at
Section 1.1 for some explanations that may short-cut some of the
discussion.
The bottom line is to update BCP 14 (RFC 2119) to
(1) make it clear that the key words MUST(/NOT), SHOULD(/NOT), and MAY
are only key words when they're in ALL CAPS, and
(2) deprecate the use of the variants (SHALL, RECOMMENDED, OPTIONAL)
so as to avoid reserving an unnecessarily number of key words.
Discussion here, please, before Ben, who has kindly agreed to
AD-sponsor this, sends it out for last call. And we do expect there
to be some significant discussion on this one.
Barry
On Tue, Aug 9, 2016 at 2:55 PM, <internet-drafts(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org> wrote:
A new version of I-D, draft-leiba-rfc2119-update-00.txt
has been successfully submitted by Barry Leiba and posted to the
IETF repository.
Name: draft-leiba-rfc2119-update
Revision: 00
Title: Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words
Document date: 2016-08-09
Group: Individual Submission
Pages: 4
URL:
https://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-leiba-rfc2119-update-00.txt
Status: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-leiba-rfc2119-update/
Htmlized: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-leiba-rfc2119-update-00
Abstract:
RFC 2119 specifies common key words that may be used in protocol
specifications. This document aims to reduce the ambiguity by
clarifying that only UPPERCASE usage of the key words have the
defined special meanings, and by deprecating some versions of the key
words.