On 8/30/11 2:23 AM, Thomson, Martin wrote:
On 2011-08-30 at 07:36:58, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:for long enough, I finally decided to submit an I-D that is intended to obsolete RFC 2119.<bike-shed> IS THERE ANY CHANCE OF AGREEING THAT SHOUTING IS BAD? (i.e., Burger's first anti-law.) As opposed to mandating that requirements ought to be shouted. Lowercase "must" can be as effective as uppercase as long as it is consistently applied. </bike-shed> You paint that as tongue-in-cheek, but Peter's draft does go down the rat-hole of picking out a color scheme for this particular bike shed, when doing so is really unwarranted. In addition to the SHOULD & co brouhaha, I have serious heartburn over this passage: When it is not appropriate to use the conformance terms, authors can use a variety of alternative words and phrases, such as: "need to" or "mandatory" instead of "MUST"; "ought to" or "strongly encouraged" instead of "SHOULD"; and "might" or "discretionary" instead of "MAY". To prevent confusion, authors ought to use these alternative words and phrases instead of the lowercase versions of the conformance terms, and to use the conformance terms only in their uppercase versions. There is no reason to tie authors' hands by restricting them from using perfectly good English words just because they happen to be the same symbols used by RFC 2119. If we're going down this path, let's scrap using MUST/SHOULD/MAY/etc, and formalize our conformance terms with symbols that aren't English words. Because the current suggestion -- which turns RFC writing into the game "Taboo" [1], but with incredibly common English words [2] as the forbidden list -- is ridiculous on its face. /a [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taboo_%28game%29 [2] According to Project Gutenberg, "must" and "may" are among the 100 words most frequently used in written literature. See http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists#Project_Gutenberg |
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