Although I agree with dropping SHALL/SHALL NOT and requiring uppercase, I'm not sure it's useful to drop REQUIRED, RECOMMENDED, and OPTIONAL. I.e., MUST/MAY/SHOULD are directives to a person. The others are adjectives describing the resulting features. I appreciate that we say things like "X is a MUST", but it hurts readability vs. "X is REQUIRED". I'm in favor of retaining those three adjectives. Joe On 8/9/2016 1:08 PM, Barry Leiba wrote: > This draft should be self-explanatory -- and please be sure to look at > Section 1.1 for some explanations that may short-cut some of the > discussion. > > The bottom line is to update BCP 14 (RFC 2119) to > (1) make it clear that the key words MUST(/NOT), SHOULD(/NOT), and MAY > are only key words when they're in ALL CAPS, and > (2) deprecate the use of the variants (SHALL, RECOMMENDED, OPTIONAL) > so as to avoid reserving an unnecessarily number of key words. > > Discussion here, please, before Ben, who has kindly agreed to > AD-sponsor this, sends it out for last call. And we do expect there > to be some significant discussion on this one. > > Barry > > On Tue, Aug 9, 2016 at 2:55 PM, <internet-drafts@xxxxxxxx> wrote: >> A new version of I-D, draft-leiba-rfc2119-update-00.txt >> has been successfully submitted by Barry Leiba and posted to the >> IETF repository. >> >> Name: draft-leiba-rfc2119-update >> Revision: 00 >> Title: Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words >> Document date: 2016-08-09 >> Group: Individual Submission >> Pages: 4 >> URL: https://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-leiba-rfc2119-update-00.txt >> Status: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-leiba-rfc2119-update/ >> Htmlized: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-leiba-rfc2119-update-00 >> >> >> Abstract: >> RFC 2119 specifies common key words that may be used in protocol >> specifications. This document aims to reduce the ambiguity by >> clarifying that only UPPERCASE usage of the key words have the >> defined special meanings, and by deprecating some versions of the key >> words. >>