Re: Uppercase question for RFC2119 words

David Farmer <farmer@umn.edu> Mon, 28 March 2016 22:05 UTC

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Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2016 17:04:58 -0500
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Subject: Re: Uppercase question for RFC2119 words
From: David Farmer <farmer@umn.edu>
To: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
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Cc: Barry Leiba <barryleiba@computer.org>, IETF-Discussion Discussion <ietf@ietf.org>
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On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 3:55 PM, John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:

> >>> - Normative text doesn't require the use of these key words.  They're
> >>> used for clarity and consistency when you want that, but lots of
> >>> normative text doesn't need to use them, and doesn't use them.
>
> So you're saying that normative text MAY use key words?  Or it SHOULD
> use key words?
>
> Signed,
> Confused
>

Personally, I believe normative text SHOULD use the capitalized keywords.
However, I'm worried we only really have consensus for MAY.

Additionally, It would also be useful to provide a recommendation regarding
advancing specification to Internet Standard (RFC6410), is adherence to
RFC2119 an important issue in that regard?  And, are capitalized keywords
more or less important than the overall stability of the text in that
process. Put more directly, should specifications be updated with
capitalized keywords as part of that process?  Or, is it more important to
keep the text the same?

Even if there isn't a consensus for SHOULD, I think clearly stating the
consensus is only MAY would be helpful and might short circuit some
unnecessary discsion.

Thanks

-- 
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