Re: RFC2119 Styling

fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> writes:

> Wanted to open a discussion about the <em class=rfc2119>MUST</em> convention:
>
> We have this section in /Guide
> https://www.w3.org/Guide/manual-of-style/#RFC which requires RFC2119
> keywords to be encoded in uppercase inside an <em> element with some
> extra styling to make it lowercase small-caps.
>
> I had two questions:
>
> - Is this comfortable for screenreaders, or should we be adopting a
>   different markup convention?

I don't know about other screen readers, but Orca reads words marked up
in this way normally.  (At least, it did when I tested it against a few
passages of XSD 1.1 Part 2 just now.)

Since I am using the default settings, the differences in rendering
between conformance-related uses of 'must' and non-conformance related
uses is not audible.  For XSD, I believe that that is unlikely to be a
problem, since the linguistic context should make the distinction clear.

> - 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.

If I remember correctly, I did not much care for this convention when
the XSD and other WGs introduced it (perhaps because I associated the
special styling with the all-caps usage of RFC 2119, which I dislike for
being badly drafted), but I have become used to it, and it does help
focus WG attention on the question of what is and what is not a
requirement for conformance.  Also, readers accustomed to the way IETF
RFCs are formulated may be used to seeing verbs capitalized when they
express requirements of a specification.

The idea that all instances of the keywords should be read using RFC
2119 is an attractive one, but it does not often seem to work in
practice.  I have frequently heard WG members and editors claim that all
occurrences of 'must' and 'may' are to read as related to conformance,
but I do not remember ever seeing such claims confirmed by inspection:
there was *always" some use of "must" which meant "it will in the nature
of things always be the case that ...", or some use of "may" meaning "it
could happen that ..."  (When these are pointed out, those WG members
who five minutes before were arguing that special formatting is not
needed to identify the conformance-related usages of the word because
ALL usages of the word are conformance related have now abandoned that
claim and are suddenly arguing that special formatting is not needed
because no one could possibly be confused by using the words in their
ordinary-language sense as well as their conformance-related sense.)

On the other hand, ISO/IEC standards appear to get by just fine without
uppercasing the verbs relevant to conformance -- partly because they do
go to great lengths to ensure that the relevant verbs are not used in
non-standard senses.

Since I'm not currently active as an editor, my opinion will count for
very little, but for what it's worth I'd leave the manual of style as it
is.

Michael Sperberg-McQueen

-- 
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Black Mesa Technologies LLC
http://blackmesatech.com

Received on Wednesday, 31 May 2023 00:47:13 UTC