Re: RFC2119 Styling

On 5/30/23 20:03, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen wrote:
> 
> 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.)

Afaict, the CSSWG, WHATWG, and at least some other groups consider such 
instances to be editorial errors, and will make an effort to reword these 
occurrences.

> 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.

I'd be in favor of adopting this practice for W3C, regardless of how we choose 
to mark up the RFC2119 keywords. I think it helps avoid confusion, and haven't 
had too much trouble finding alternative wording.

~fantasai
CSSWG editor

Received on Wednesday, 31 May 2023 01:57:39 UTC