XHTML 1.1 - Module-based XHTML [#2]

[ This was sent to www-html, but it is more appropriate to 
www-html-editor /olle ]

Hi,

I would like to have a minor issue clarified.

In "XHTML 1.1 - Module-based XHTML" (W3C REC 31 May 2001, 
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/ ), in section 2, "Conformance 
Definition",  (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/conformance.html) we find, 
in the introduction, the following statement:

<excerpt>
The keywords "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", 
"SHOULD", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to 
be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
</excerpt>

This wording  confused me, as I do not see any occurrences of uppercase 
"MUST", etc. in the REC. Two possible interpretations:

(1) "well, no harm putting this statement in the doc, event though it 
does not apply to anything there."

(2) "actually, this statement refers to _all_ occurrences of "must", 
etc.,  in lower case as well as any other "cased" variants thereof."

If the second alternative is the correct one, then one has to be very 
careful when reading the REC. It of easy to regard "shall" as nice 
syntactic sugar in the language, while "SHALL" definitely raises a 
warning flag.

I would be thankful for a clarification of how the excerpt reproduced 
above applies to this REC.

regards,


/olle

-- 
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Olle Olsson   olleo@sics.se   Tel: +46 8 633 15 19  Fax: +46 8 751 72 30
	[Svenska W3C-kontoret: olleo@w3.org]
SICS [Swedish Institute of Computer Science]
Box 1263
SE - 164 29 Kista
Sweden
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Received on Friday, 12 September 2003 10:33:30 UTC