Re: Making RFC2119 key language easier to Protocol Readers

[Abdussalam Baryun <[e-mail]>]

We can fix that, by discussing it further, or as Scott mentioned make
a survey within IETF [*]

[*] http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg76582.html

AB

On 1/5/13, Abdussalam Baryun <[e-mail]> wrote:
> (was Re: I'm struggling with 2219 language again)
>
>>> Where you want to use MUST is where an implementation might be tempted
>>> to take a short cut -- to the detriment of the Internet -- but could
>>> do so without actually breaking interoperability. A good example is
>>> with retransmissions and exponential backoff. You can implement those
>>> incorrectly (or not at all), and still get "interoperability". I.e.,
>>> two machines can talk to each other. Maybe you don't get "good"
>>> intereoperability and maybe not great performance under some
>>> conditions, but you can still build an interoperabile implementation.
>
>>> IMO, too many specs seriously overuse/misuse 2119 language, to the
>>> detriment of readability, common sense, and reserving the terms to
>>> bring attention to those cases where it really is important to
>>> highlight an important point that may not be obvious to a casual
>>> reader/implementor.
>
>>Sadly true.
>
> We can fix that, by discussing it further, or as Scott mentioned the survey
> [*]
>
>>> two machines can talk to each other. Maybe you don't get "good"
>>> intereoperability and maybe not great performance under some
>>> conditions, but you can still build an interoperabile implementation.
>
> As machines reads and writes may depend on conditions, I don't think
> it is true that you can still interoperabile implementation by
> ignoring using/documenting requirement keys language (i.e. all common
> keys of all languages).
>
> AB
>