[whatwg] Re: comments on Web Forms 2.0, 27 June 2004

[Malcolm Rowe]

Hi Ian, 

>>>> * 1.6 Conformance Requirements -- Web Forms says that conformance is
>>>> indicated by RFC2119 terms, but doesn't use any AFAICT; while there are
>>>> many lower-case must, may and should's in the document, they need to be
>>>> uppercase to qualify as requirements.
>>> Why do they need to be uppercase?
>> RFC2119 explicitly defines them in upper case
> Where?

While RFC2119 doesn't explicitly require the terms to be in uppercase, they 
are defined 'in' uppercase (that is, the definitions use uppercase 
exclusively). They are also repeated in uppercase in the remainder of the 
document, lending credence to the idea that they aren't just uppercase for 
stylistic purposes. 

Additionally, as Mark points out, pretty much every other RFC and spec uses 
uppercase terms, and so not doing so here is unexpected. 

> Every use of those terms in normative sections of the spec are occurances 
> of RFC2119 terms. It shouldn't be that confusing.

And that's fine, but say so, because it isn't obvious. 

I think I originally suggested lifting the prose from CSS 2.1: 

"The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", 
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this 
document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 (see [RFC2119]). 
However, for readability, these words do not appear in all uppercase letters 
in this specification."
 -- http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/conform.html#q1 

Was there anything in particular you didn't like about that? 

Regards,
Malcolm