- From: Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.rpi.edu>
- Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 09:24:36 -0500
- To: Michael Schneider <schneid@fzi.de>
- Cc: "Bijan Parsia" <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>, "OWL Working Group WG" <public-owl-wg@w3.org>
Mike - I'll let others address the technical issues, but on this: >> >> And would like to extend the compatibility, this might mean making >> slight changes to both. In either case, these are SHOULDs not MUSTs > > (Please...) > > Ok, maybe we should(!) try to settle on the meaning of the word > "SHOULD" here. So my question to you or to the many people around, > which are more experienced in W3C WG activities than me (i.e. > everyone else): Is there any documented meaning of the word > "SHOULD" in the W3C? > > Otherwise, I will have to come up with my own interpretation, and > you may decide whether it is acceptable for you or not. > it's actually easy - those words have a technical meaning within standards development efforts - particularly when spelled in all caps - these are specified, yes, really, ,in a document called RDF-2119, which is available online at [1]. At the bottom of the charter for this (and all W3C WGs) is a pointer to some documents that govern this stuff (in the "W3C Working Group Resources") -- when you see us arguing "process" or saying that there's something specific that is or is not incombent on us by W3C rules, these are the documents we are referring to (some of us have been doing this so long that we bore our spouses by reciting them in our sleep :-)) anyway, following links to links to links from these documents you will find the RFC2119 pointer (and it is in the status section or footnotes of many W3C documents - pretty much all of them that use any of these capitalized modal verbs. Hope that helps, Jim H. [1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt
Received on Friday, 25 January 2008 14:25:00 UTC