--On Monday, June 24, 2013 16:28 -0400 Alia Atlas <akatlas@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I read SHOULD and RECOMMENDED as different. > > SHOULD is how a implementation ought to behave unless there > are special circumstances (deployment, additional > functionality, better idea). MUST says that there are no > circumstances special enough to change the behavior. > > RECOMMENDED is closer to a Best Current Practice (BCP); so I > might write "It is RECOMMENDED that the network-converged > timer have a minimum value of 2 seconds." but in 10 years, > maybe it'll only take 2 microseconds - so that'll become a bad > recommendation! And that, again, is close to the distinction that a reasonable person might read into 2026. But not into 2119 which appears (at least to me) to make them fully-substitutable alternatives. The distinction doesn't make the comments made by Peter, Dave, or others any less valid. If we told ourselves that readers should (lower case) infer conformance statements from SHOULD and applicability ones from RECOMMENDED... well, we would be pretty delusional. john