Re: RFC 2119 terms, ALL CAPS vs lower case

[Hector Santos <[e-mail]>]

+1

My view that this is more about the specific issues of documents and 
not just RFC2119 itself.  Sometimes it falls through the cracks. 
Sometimes a justification or argument is found to show the contrary of 
what is stated, especially when its uses lower cases or even terms 
like "choose."  Sometimes its just new conflicts of integrated 
documents where perhaps an augmented RFC attempts to reinforce what 
the base RFC may have lacked.

In my view, it will help if future I-D and RFC authors begin to have 
one new section called in chapter 1.0

   1.x - Minimum Compliancy Requirement Summary

Far too often documents have mixed functional and technical 
specifications, mixed normative and non-normative compliance semantics 
too spread out and peppered throughout the document making it harder 
to catch compliance level issues.

-- 
HLS


Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> On 2012-05-16 18:53, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
>> On 5/16/12 9:58 AM, Sam Hartman wrote:
> 
> ...
>>> I'll note that  in my normal reading mode I  do not distinguish case,
>>> but even so I find the ability to use may and should in RFC text without
>>> the 2119 implications valuable.
> 
> Agreed. But as a gen-art reviewer, I have several times had to ask
> authors whether a particular lower case "may" was intended to be normative
> or normal English. Authors must be fastidious about this.
> 
>> Your mileage may (or is that MAY?) vary, but to forestall confusion I've
>> settled on the practice of using "can" and "might" instead of lowercase
>> "may", "ought to" and "is suggested to" instead of lowercase "should",
>> and "needs to" or "has to" instead of lowercase "must" (etc.). I'm not
>> saying that anyone else SHOULD or MUST use that convention, but you
>> might consider it in your own spec-writing.
> 
> It is indeed very important not to use "may" when it's ambiguous.
> "It may rain today" is fine; "you may leave now" is not (I can think
> of three different meanings). In RFC2119-talk, "you MAY leave now"
> only has one meaning.