Re: RFC 2119 terms, ALL CAPS vs lower case

[Edward Lewis <[e-mail]>]

At 9:59 -0400 5/16/12, Barry Leiba wrote:

>It's probably worth having a discussion of all of that, and seeing
>whether there's some possibility of developing a rough community consensus
>on what we might-could-maybe-oughta-should do.

What I've run into, a couple of times, in the past few years are 
customer documents, such as RFP (request for proposals) that ask 
about compliance with RFC documents.  In that role it doesn't really 
matter whether the RFC 2119 words are written one way or another, the 
pain is that RFCs generally do not define what it means to be 
compliant.

Granted the RFC series is not intended to be (all) requirements 
documents nor standards documents against which compliance can be 
judged.  I am not saying the RFC series is deficient in the role it 
is intended to play.  But if there is a discussion on the topic of 
the RFC 2119 words, I'd encourage giving thought to appeasing those 
that want documents against which compliance can be judged.

Perhaps a sub-series of RFC documents can be tagged for compliance 
applicability, written in way that testing of requirements is 
possible, and so on.  In such a sub-series, special-meaning words 
would matter.  In all other documents, all words would "revert" to 
their natural meanings.  E.g., SHOULD would be the same as "ought 
to", MUST would be the same as "it has to be" and so on.
-- 
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Edward Lewis
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2012...time to reuse those 1984 calendars!