Hi, > o When these words are not capitalized, they have their normal > English meanings; this document has nothing to do with them. There are, and probably always will be, standards track documents that do not cite RFC 2119 and do not use upper-case normative keywords. In those documents, we will find usage of 'should' and 'should not' whose interpretation will remain ambiguous. (Does 'should' mean 'must unless there is a very good reason' or something less?) I think that ambiguity is worth pointing out. I don't think 'must' and 'may' are ambiguous in that way. However, that point leads me to another issue: > Authors who follow these guidelines should incorporate this phrase > near the beginning of their document: I think that 'should' needs to be 'must'. Otherwise we could in theory have documents using both 'MUST' and 'must' with no disambiguation. (This is also a bug in RFC 2119.) > To reduce the number of reserved key words, the following key words > are deprecated, and no longer have special meanings defined by BCP > 14: > > REQUIRED, SHALL, SHALL NOT, RECOMMENDED, NOT RECOMMENDED, OPTIONAL I will be glad to see the back of SHALL, but I object to deprecating the adjectives. They are useful - indeed, sometimes required - for the construction of readable sentences and, for example, tables of RECOMMENDED and OPTIONAL values. Regards Brian Carpenter On 10/08/2016 07:55, internet-drafts@xxxxxxxx wrote: > > A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories. > > > Title : Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words > Author : Barry Leiba > Filename : draft-leiba-rfc2119-update-00.txt > Pages : 4 > Date : 2016-08-09 > > 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. > > > The IETF datatracker status page for this draft is: > https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-leiba-rfc2119-update/ > > There's also a htmlized version available at: > https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-leiba-rfc2119-update-00 > > > Please note that it may take a couple of minutes from the time of submission > until the htmlized version and diff are available at tools.ietf.org. > > Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP at: > ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/ > > _______________________________________________ > I-D-Announce mailing list > I-D-Announce@xxxxxxxx > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/i-d-announce > Internet-Draft directories: http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html > or ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf/1shadow-sites.txt >