XHTML 1.1 - Module-based XHTML

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 
suger 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 Thursday, 11 September 2003 04:25:03 UTC