Re: [secdir] Secdir review of draft-ietf-6man-uri-zoneid-05

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

On 23/11/2012 14:26, Barry Leiba wrote:
>> The WG reached consensus on a SHOULD-based version. The whole issue
>> of browser behaviour is contentious, so changing to MUST would be
>> a WG issue, above my pay grade as a document editor. I will wait
>> for instructions.
>>
> 
> Could you
> 
> 1: give us some background on the discussion that resulted in SHOULD
> instead of MUST, and

I don't recall it being explicitly discussed - what I meant is that
this is the text that got through WG last call and post-last-call
discussion, without dissent.

> 2: consider adding explanations of when it would be appropriate to not do a
> SHOULD?

Yes, this is one of the things I look for when reviewing documents, too ;-)

> For 2, above, there's a great difference between "SHOULD do x unless
> there's some reason that it's impossible in this implementation" and
> "SHOULD do x unless you don't happen to agree with it."  I'd like to try to
> tease those apart.

I'm not a browser implementor, but as far as I can tell, there is a strong
tendency in that community to respect the law of least user astonishment,
so my very personal interpretation is "you SHOULD do this unless experience
shows that it will confuse the user." However, I think the real interpretation
in this case is closer to your first one - do this, because it helps the
user, unless your implementation makes this unreasonable.

Very much IMHO.

    Brian