Re: [urn] normative language -- a new convention

[Ted Hardie <[e-mail]>]

Howdy,

I am quite concerned about the convention proposed.  Using case to
distinguish the origin of a requirement seems to me a very fragile
method compared to simply quoting the appropriate standard in its
existing language.  Consider, for example, the use of a screen reader
by a developer; I am not confident that it would preserve this signal.

regards,

Ted Hardie

On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 1:33 AM, Alfred HÎnes <[e-mail]> wrote:
> <speaking both as an individual and as a co-chair>
>
>
> With URN Namespace registration documents, we have the recurring
> issue of choosing the appropriate normative language to indicate
> requirements imposed by the document itself and those imposed by
> external standards/documents for the underlying namespace, and to
> distinguish these from the common form of the plain verbs as used
> in natural language.
>
> With the approval of the IESG, RFC 6329 (published in April 2012)
> has introduced a new convention (see Section 3 of that RFC), and
> I suggest that we liberally adopt this method for our WG documents:
>
> - RFC 2119 terms (in all capital letters) denote normative document
>  requirements according to RFC 2119, which MUST be at a protocol
>  or meta-protocol level and conformance to these terms needs to be
>  verifiable from external behavior of the protocol entities.
>
> - The lowercase forms with initial capital:  "Must", "Must Not",
>  "Shall", "Shall Not", "Should", "Should Not", "May", and "Optional"
>  are to be interpreted as quotations of external normative
>  requirements posed by other SDOs (in particular, ISO, in our
>  current cases of bibliographic URN Namespaces).
>
> - The all-lowercase forms still carry their natural language meaning.
>
>  It is regarded good practice by some folks to avoid these lowercase
>  forms, but opinions on that advice differ largely.  Note that the
>  former RFC Editor, Bob Braden -- who once, as the editor of STD 3
>  (RFCs 1122 and 1123) had introduced the systematical use of these
>  all-uppercase terms into the Internet Standard document set --,
>  once stated that the proportion of non-capitalized to capitalized
>  "must"/"should"/"may" is one kind of quality scale for RFCs.
>
> It should be recalled that Section 6 of RFC 2119 literally says about
> the capitalized forms:
>
>  "Imperatives of the type defined in this memo must be used with care
>   and sparingly.  In particular, they MUST only be used where it is
>   actually required for interoperation or to limit behavior which has
>   potential for causing harm (e.g., limiting retransmisssions)  For
>   example, they must not be used to try to impose a particular method
>   on implementors where the method is not required for
>   interoperability."
>
>
> Kind regards,
>  Alfred.
>
> --
>
> +------------------------+--------------------------------------------+
> | TR-Sys Alfred Hoenes   |  Alfred Hoenes   Dipl.-Math., Dipl.-Phys.  |
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