Re: Making RFC2119 key language easier to Protocol Readers

[Abdussalam Baryun <[e-mail]>]

(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