[Bug 29498] [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

--- Comment #1 from Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com> ---
The current situation was arrived at as the resolution of bug #28011 which was
extensively debated.

The reason F+O does not reference RFC 2119 is that it does not use the words
MUST, MAY, and SHOULD with their RFC meaning. Instead it uses them as defined
in section

https://www.w3.org/XML/Group/qtspecs/specifications/xpath-functions-31/html/Overview-diff.html#conformance-terminology

Note that this section has been completely rewritten since the CR.

The essential difference is that the RFC 2119 definitions invariable place
requirements either on a processor (a piece of software claiming conformance)
or on documents (a piece of text that may or may not be valid according to the
specification). In F+O we use them mainly to place requirements on the caller
of a function ("the prefix MUST be declared in the in-scope namespaces"); and
failure to satisfy a MUST condition is not a non-conformance issue, it is
something that simply causes a function to throw a dynamic error.

In addition, it has long been a policy of the WG that F+O does not state
conformance requirements; since RFC 2119 is all about conformance, referring to
it would therefore be inappropriate.

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Received on Friday, 26 February 2016 10:34:35 UTC