Re: Testing SHOULD

L. David Baron wrote:
> On Saturday 2008-05-03 10:56 +1000, Alan Gresley wrote:
>> fantasai wrote:
>>> There are three levels of requirement in the CSS specs
>>>
>>> MUST - the behavior is required
>>> SHOULD/RECOMMENDED - the behavior is required unless there's a
>>>                      good reason not to do it
>>> MAY - the behavior is allowed
> 
>> I would say RECOMMENDED since 'should' or similar 'could' are quite weak 
>> words considering there 'should' be good reason not to do it (the 
>> behavior). For MAY I 'would' like OPTIONAL instead.
> 
> These terms aren't up for debate.  They've been standardized by RFC
> 2119 for over ten years: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt .  Nor
> is a spec-wide editorial rewrite (to prefer some RFC 2119 terms over
> others) of CSS 2.1 appropriate at its current maturity level (nor is
> this the appropriate list to raise such an issue).
> 
> Using "SHOULD" and "MAY" is often much more concise than "OPTIONAL"
> and "RECOMMENDED", and experienced spec readers ought to know what
> they mean (or notice the text at the beginning pointing to RFC
> 2119).

Er.. a) we're talking about flags for tests, not wording for specs and
b) Alan's suggestion matches RFC2119 anyway.

~fantasai

Received on Saturday, 3 May 2008 15:06:21 UTC