Re: [i81] Content Negotiation for media types

On tis, 2007-11-20 at 17:15 +1100, Mark Nottingham wrote:

> Do people think that having a notion of conditional vs. full
> compliance is useful, as currently used in the spec? I've always been
> a little bit uncomfortable with overloading SHOULD, which RFC2119
> defines as
> 
> 
> > 3. SHOULD   This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that
> > there
> >    may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a
> >    particular item, but the full implications must be understood and
> >    carefully weighed before choosing a different course.
> 
> 
> Using SHOULD to determine conformance levels takes flexibility away in
> a lot of cases; sometimes a SHOULD should be a SHOULD, without giving
> someone the stigma of "conditional conformance."

Which fits quite nicely with the conditionally compliant criteria,
except that nearly every existing implementation is conditionally
compliant in one way or another..

An implementation not implementing a relevant SHOULD is not behaving
entirely as expected by the RFC, but should still interoperate with any
other compliant implementation without too much trouble. Therefore the
conditionally compliant level.

Regards
Henrik