Re: MUST-MAY-SHOULD (MMS) audit...

Jim Gettys:
>
>
>There has been no comments on Jeff and Scott's massive audit.  I suspect 
>everyone who has looked at them has had their eyes glaze over; I know 
>I have.

I managed to go through Jeff's audit and get halfway through Scott's
audit so far.  Here are some comments.

- Jim: I looked at your corrections to their corrections and they seem
  correct to me.

- Generic editorial warning: I seem to remember (though I don't know
  where I learnt it) that notes in an RFC are always non-normative by
  convention, so there should be no MMS terminology in them.  Jeff's
  corrections seem to take the opposite view, whereas Scott makes
  judgment calls on a note by note basis.  I don't have a direct
  connection to any RFC repository now so I can't check whether there
  are generic conventions with respect to notes, but somebody should
  check this.

- MMS 025: I am not sure if Jeff is right in his assumption as to what
  the term "common form" is supposed to mean.  Maybe "common form"
  means `not extended over multiple lines' here.

- MMS 117: The musts in the two items define conditions to be met for
  a MAY to apply, so they should be lowercase (or preferably
  rephrased), not uppercase.

- MMS 125: in the definition of "invalidate an entity", the two
  shoulds are defining a term, they are are not keywords specifying a
  requirement, so they should be rephrased, e.g. from `should' to
  `will'.  [This is a bit of a judgment call: I believe a phrase like

       "MUST cause a cache to invalidate the entity"

  (which is used in the paragraph following the definition) was meant
  to expand to

       "MUST cause a cache to either remove all instances or mark them
       as invalid"

  and not to 

       "MUST cause a cache to apply the rule that it SHOULD either
        remove all instances or mark them as invalid"

  which is only a SHOULD level requirement at the core.]

Koen.