--On Tuesday, September 13, 2011 08:28 +1200 Brian E Carpenter
<brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> John,
>
> I don't share your confusion. I do feel that to be able to
> construct reasonably pleasant sentences, we need both the verb
> SHOULD and the adjectival participle RECOMMENDED, and their
> negatives, in various circumstances.
>
> I could propose an alternative erratum, adding MANDATORY,
> but I won't; it's NOT MANDATORY to increase confusion.
Brian,
I don't think this is worth pushing very hard, nor spending a
lot of time on. If Peter wants to approve the other (499)
erratum in the name of editorial consistency, I will lose
exactly zero sleep over it.
However, as things have evolved, our goal is apparently to turn
the terminology of 2026 and 2119 into very specific terms of art
with clear boundaries. Personally, I don't particularly like
such efforts. As you know from other discussions, I generally
believe that trying to force our increasingly-complex protocols
and protocol interactions into rigid categories (whether those
are Proposed/ Draft/ Full, MUST/ SHOULD / MAY and their
negations, or something else), presumably by the method of
Procrustes because nothing else really works, does not serve us
well. But, if we are going to do it, then lists of synonyms and
near-synonyms for those terms of art really don't help us.
Even if use of the specific terms sometimes leads to awkward
sentence constructions, so does trying to avoid those terms when
they are not appropriate. I note that
draft-hansen-nonkeywords-non2119 takes us into the realm of
personifying protocols to the extent of talking about what they
"need to" do, a construction that would have given the people
who taught me --and probably you-- how to write at least a bad
case of the creeps and possible outrage.
So, again, if we really intend terms of art, rather than
slightly-less-informal prose, I think we would be better off
with one term per concept/category and living with it. If we
really intend slightly-less-informal prose --which is the way I
took the intent of 2119 when it was first written (perhaps
erroneously)-- then none of this discussion and the
corresponding hair-splitting makes much difference and we should
just make 2119 internally consistent and move on.
YMMD.
john
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf@xxxxxxxx
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf