On 18/12/2012 22:50, Ben Campbell wrote: > I think Nick's email was a review of the document in general, yes, sorry, it was. I hit reply when I saw the subject line. > I don't think so. This draft does not establish a standard, or define a > protocol. While I don't speak for the authors, I don't think it's > intended to make normative statements about anything. The language is > descriptive, not prescriptive. ok, noted. > (I agree "has to" is an awkward substitute for the non-normative "must". > I agree that "must" should generally be avoided when there can be > confusion about the normativeness of a statement. I'm not sure that's > the case here, since the whole doc is non-normative. And I think we > could find better language even when the confusion is possible.) "needs to"? "ought to"? It's all massively context dependent though. What's needed are some words / phrases which are defined to have local imperative scope only or else nonlocal informative "must" - but yeah it's messy and generally will involve nontrivial wordsmithing to work around what is meant. Nick