[Bug 29498] New: [FO31] Some normative RFC 2119 MAY/SHOULD etc appear in non-normative Notes, RFC itself is not mentioned in conformance section

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=29498

            Bug ID: 29498
           Summary: [FO31] Some normative RFC 2119 MAY/SHOULD etc appear
                    in non-normative Notes, RFC itself is not mentioned in
                    conformance section
           Product: XPath / XQuery / XSLT
           Version: Candidate Recommendation
          Hardware: PC
                OS: Windows NT
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: XPath 3.1
          Assignee: jonathan.robie@gmail.com
          Reporter: abel.braaksma@xs4all.nl
        QA Contact: public-qt-comments@w3.org
  Target Milestone: ---

I'm confused about a few occasions where the RFC xxx of MAY, RECOMMEND, SHOULD
etc appear in explanatory Notes. The intent may have been that the verbs should
be taken as written in the RFC, but this conflicts with the Notes themselves
being non-normative.

I'm not sure whether this is a big problem or not, but if possible, the Note
should probably have the non-capitalized versions of these verbs and/or the
Note, if meant to be normative, should not be a Note to begin with?

I found the following 8 items using the following query on the XHTML source,
which may or may not be an exhaustive list:

//*:span[@class="verb"][ancestor::*:div[@class/contains(., "note")]]

1) 4.1 Numeric Types: "when casting from string to double the lexical form -0
*MAY* be converted to positive zero"

2) 4.1 Numeric Types: "though negative zero is RECOMMENDED."

3) 9.8.4.4 The language, calendar, and place arguments: "This is the convention
that *SHOULD* be used when the requested calendar is OS"

4) 9.8.4.4 The language, calendar, and place arguments: "the conventions of ISO
8601 *SHOULD* be followed"

5) 19.1.2.1 Casting to xs:float: "Implementations *SHOULD* return negative
zero"

6) 19.1.2.1 Casting to xs:float: "implementations *MAY* return positive zero in
this case."

7) 19.1.2.2 Casting to xs:double: "Implementations *SHOULD* return negative
zero for xs:double"

8) 19.1.2.2 Casting to xs:double: "implementations *MAY* return positive zero
in this case."

Similar situations may have appeared in the XP31 text, but it uses different
styles and tags for each normative MUST/SHOULD etc, as such it is much harder
to query the XHTML. I tried the following to get the elements containing these
texts and it returns 13 items, which I haven't checked by hand yet:

//(*)
[not(*)]
[upper-case(.) = ("MUST", "MUST NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "MAY")]

----------------

Interestingly, XP31 references RFC 2119, XSLT references RFC 2119, as does
XQuery, but FO31 does not mention it. I would assume that it "inherits" its
reference from XP31, but perhaps repeating it in the Conformance section may be
a good thing, esp. since there are about 219 official, tagged occurrences of
these keywords.

Furthermore, the Conformance section in XP31 links to RFC 2119, and mentions
"MUST", "MUST NOT", "SHOULD" and "MAY", but not "RECOMMENDED", "(NOT)
REQUIRED", which are used in the normative prose.

I think that is an omission?

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Received on Monday, 22 February 2016 00:57:52 UTC