Re: ACTION-295: Should v. Must

Highlighting conventions aren't 100% consistent across either groups or time -- some groups choose to highlight in all-caps, some in bold, and some don't at all.

Generally, it's useful to aim at clear text, and to avoid unnecessary ambiguity.

The following rules of thumb help with that:

- Use RFC 2119 keywords in the sense in which they're documented in RFC 2119.

- Document the use of these keywords in the status of the document section, or very, very early in the document.

- Avoid subtle distinctions between use of these keywords in upper case and lowercase, simply because they are likely to confuse readers.  Assume that *somebody* will misread a lowercase-should for an uppercase one.

Regards,
-- 
Thomas Roessler, W3C <tlr@w3.org> (@roessler)



On 2012-10-20, at 15:16 +0200, David Wainberg <david@networkadvertising.org> wrote:

> 
> On 10/20/12 2:04 AM, Michael[tm] Smith wrote:
>> "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@gbiv.com>, 2012-10-19 14:18 -0700:
>> 
>>> On Oct 19, 2012, at 1:40 PM, David Wainberg wrote:
>>>> On 10/18/12 6:47 PM, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
>>>>> Editors, please note that the all-caps is only for highlighting
>>>>> the words so that requirements are easily found -- all usage
>>>>> of those words, whether in caps or not, is subject to RFC2119.
>>>> Roy -- I'm confused on this point. The W3C process doc says the following:
>>>> 
>>>> " The terms MUST, MUST NOT, SHOULD, SHOULD NOT, REQUIRED, and MAY when
>>>> highlighted (through style sheets, and in uppercase in the source) are
>>>> used in accordance with RFC 2119 [RFC2119]."
>>>> 
>>>> It specifies "when highlighted," so I expected that to be the convention for all W3C docs.
>>> Thanks David, I was not aware of that statement in the W3C process.
>> To be clear, it's not in the Process document as a general statement about
>> requirements or conventions for other W3C documents. It's simply a statement
>> in the "Status of this Document" of the Process document itself, And the
>> scope of it is restricted to just the Process document itself. It's clearly
>> not intended to express or imply any convention for other W3C documents.
> Yes, I could have been more clear about that. But, having read it in the process doc, I assumed it to be the convention for all W3 docs, expecting that the organization would expect consistency on something like that.
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Received on Sunday, 21 October 2012 14:03:22 UTC