Re: RFC2119 Styling

On Tue, May 30, 2023 at 12:56 PM fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:
> - Should this markup be optional or required? Not all specs currently follow
> this style: e.g. some specs just use regular casing, and define all instances
> of these keywords to invoke RFC2119.

Notably, the CSSWG has *never* used this markup convention, and in any
case often uses slightly different wording that still makes assertions
and should be interpreted in the same way as 2119 wording - see
<https://drafts.csswg.org/css/#w3c-conventions>. (And also see
<https://infra.spec.whatwg.org/#conformance> and
<https://infra.spec.whatwg.org/#algorithms>, which covers WHATWG specs
generally, and informally covers a bunch of W3C specs.)

So, assuming the CSSWG/WHATWG/lots of other W3C specs usage isn't
confusing anyone, that's a decent argument against not having to do
this funky markup+formatting. And if people *are*, for whatever
reason, depending on that formatting to tell where a normative
requirement is, they'll be missing a ton anyway where we say something
"is" X, or "To X: <list steps>", which are also MUST-equivalent.

So I strongly recommend that we amend the Manual Of Style to drop the
formatting requirement. In general I propose adopting the Infra spec's
wording entirely; its subsetting of the 2119 keywords is good, and it
contains good suggestions for alternate wording that avoids tripping
over the keywords.

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 30 May 2023 20:26:29 UTC