Re: RFC 2119 terms, ALL CAPS vs lower case

[Marshall Eubanks <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 1:06 AM, Hector Santos <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Lee Howard wrote:
>>
>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of
>>
>> Dave Cridland
>>>
>>> Consider:
>>>
>>> "An octet may contain 0-255".
>>> "An octet contains 0-255".
>>> "An octet might contain 0-255" - or it might not?
>>> "The Foo octet MUST lie between 0 and 127 inclusive; that is, the highest
>>
>> bit MUST NOT
>>>
>>> be set."
>>> "A valid Foo octet lies between 0 and 127 inclusive; that is, the highest
>>
>> bit is never set."
>>
>> We do not improve clarity by making sentences harder to read.
>
>
> Or colorizing it.

I find this morning a message on the URN WG list
by Alfred Hines on RFC 6329, which has a new (AFAIK) convention on
normative language

3.  Conventions Used in This Document

   The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
   "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
   document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].

   The lowercase forms with an initial capital "Must", "Must Not",
   "Shall", "Shall Not", "Should", "Should Not", "May", and "Optional"
   in this document are to be interpreted in the sense defined in
   [RFC2119], but are used where the normative behavior is defined in
   documents published by SDOs other than the IETF.


I am not sure this is in the direction of greater clarity. Should
there be a need to
overlay different degrees of normativeness onto a text, XML would
probably be better bet.
Whether the previous sentence is normative or not is left as an
exercise for the reader.

Regards
Marshall


>
>
>> We should avoid rfc2119 language where possible, to be clear, but not at
>> the
>> expense of clarity.
>
>
> +1, I think this is more specific to documents and not RFC2119. I don't
> think we can generalize RFC2119.
>
>
> --
> HLS
>
>