Re: QASG last call comments: Case of RFC2119 terms

Susan,

Below is a sample from a thread of discussion on www-qa.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-qa/2005Jan/thread.html#9

In our work in PF, for example see
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2004Aug/0007.html
it would appear that

a) the content document
a.1) should clearly associate all instances of RFC-2119 keywords used
in their RFC-2119 senses with RFC-2119 as the authoritative source of
the intended meaning or interpretation of this term in this context.
Also clearly distinguish all instances of RFC-2119 keywords *not*
used in their RFC-2119 senses from that pattern of usage.
[exactly how to make this association and dis-assoication is, to my
knowledge, still not the subject of a broad-consensus answer. But
we're working on it.]
a.2) contain an explanation of the style used to reflect this in the 
rendered content.

b) the styling
b.1) should set the terms off somehow from plain natural language where they
appear in a prose flow of otherwise natural language text.
b.2) may uppercase, or otherwise impose rendering effects.  Need not uppercase
so long as b.1 is satisfied.

As I recall, this is closely related to the question of the semantic 
and presentational
style to be used when embedding code symbols in running text, the subject of
a BOF at the 2003 Technical Plenary that you organized.  But I don't 
readily find
a link leading to the latest and greatest PubReq clauses in this 
area, or precursor
discussions to PubReq discussions.

Can you help my memory and searching skills on this point?

What is the state of W3C usage guidance as regards symbols and Terms of Art
as used in W3C specification documents?  Is the QA volume under discussion here
the high water mark?

Al


Le 19 janv. 2005, à 09:54, Ian Hickson a écrit :
>"3.2 Requirement A: Use a consistent style for conformance
>requirements and explain how to distinguish them." mentions that
>RFC2119 terms are uppercase, but it should be noted that nothing in
>RFC2119 (other than consistent usage as such) requires them to be used
>in uppercase, despite specifications frequently explicitly mentioning
>that they use lowercase variants instead.

I had difficulties to find what you were talking about. You are 
talking about the techniques verbiage for this point:

[[[
Using RFC 2119 [RFC2119] Keywords (MUST, SHOULD, MAY, ...) makes it 
easy to spot conformance requirements, due to their specific 
uppercase formatting; according to the RFC itself, they should be 
used only to establish interoperation [WIKI-RFC-KEYWORDS];
]]]

The sentence says "due to their specific uppercase formatting" which 
indeed can be misleading because it's not required by the RFC 2119 
spec itself
	http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt



--
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager
*** Be Strict To Be Cool ***

Received on Monday, 31 January 2005 18:36:31 UTC