RE: REPORTS

> From: John Hall [mailto:johnhall@evergo.net] 
> 
> MAY is more appropriate than SHOULD given the late date at 
> which the change was made, the manner of the change, and the 
> fact that a commercial implementation of the spec will not be 
> implementing this report and will recommend that clients who 
> wish to be interoperable avoid it as well.
> And if there is no difference between MAY and SHOULD, then 
> there should be no objection to making it MAY.

There is no material difference to a client implementer,
since both MAY and SHOULD means that your client needs to
prepared for it not being implemented.

The only difference is to a server implementer, and even
there, it is just a hint from the working group to the
implementor, not a requirement.

The consensus at the IETF meeting was that the expand-property
report was valuable enough (as demonstrated on the mailing list)
for it to be worth strengthening the MAY to a SHOULD.
Currently, we have only received objections from one vendor
about this, which does not in my opinion represent sufficient
opposition to reflect a lack of consensus.

Cheers,
Geoff

Received on Thursday, 6 September 2001 15:21:43 UTC