is there such a thing as a conditional synonym?

hello.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2015/WD-activitystreams-vocabulary-20150129/#dfn-like 
currently says the following:

"The Favorite and Like activity types MAY be used as equivalent synonyms 
if an implementation chooses."

i am wondering how much sense that makes. if that's the case, then 
implementations can never choose to use "like" and "favorite" for 
something different, because somewhere in a pipeline of AS processing 
implementations, there can be one that randomly switches those verbs 
around (or "normalizes" both to only one of them), and the current 
language allows it to do so.

if you allow things to be treated as synonyms, you have effectively 
defined them to be synonymous in the context of the ecosystem you are 
defining, because you have given implementations the permissions to 
switch them around. to make this clear, i think it would be clearer to 
simply say:

"The Favorite and Like activity types are synonymous."

are we losing anything when we make it this simple?

cheers,

dret.

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erik wilde | mailto:dret@berkeley.edu  -  tel:+1-510-2061079 |
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Received on Tuesday, 10 February 2015 23:24:19 UTC