The recent high-volume threads on this draft had the effect of causing me to read it. Sorry for being sucked in. I oppose the deprecation of the keywords in Section 3. More specifically: if I choose to capitalise these words in a document that I write then I either have to define the meaning afresh in each document or write a new 2119 replacement of my own to reference. In general, however, I don't see the motivation for the document. 2119 (despite some clumsy language) has served us well enough and is well-enough understood to have been used a few times. Barry's most recent suggestion is... In many standards track documents several words are used to signify the requirements in the specification. These words are often capitalized, as shown below, but they do not have to be. This document defines how these words are interpreted in IETF documents when the words are capitalized and/or marked as <bcp14> in the This appears to say (well, it does say) that "the words" are used to "signify" the requirements and are not always capitalised when they do. It then says it defines how they are interpreted when capitalised "and/or" marked with BCP14, which implies that if I use lower case but reference BCP14 then the interpretation provided by this document applies. The later attempt to disclaim definition of "normal English meanings" runs counter to these two statements. If you feel a strong need to pursue this document then I think Ted's suggestion (Talmudic commentary) is the way to go: that is, "Report on the use of RFC 2119 and guidance for future use of normative language." This would not be an update to 2119 and would not require (but could be used as a) normative reference from other documents. Cheers, Adrian