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

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 23 Aug 2004, Malcolm Rowe wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > * 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.

What the purpose may have been is not spelled out in the spec, and the 
spec certainly doesn't mention requiring that they be upper case, though. 
Which is my point. :-) They don't _need_ to be uppercase, it's just, IMHO, 
a typographic convention.


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

Many, many specs (especially W3C specs) don't use uppercase.


> > 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. 

It now says:

| The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", 
| "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in the 
| normative parts of this document are to be interpreted as described in 
| [RFC2119]. For readability, these words do not appear in all uppercase 
| letters in this specification.

Is that ok?

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'