[whatwg] Re: RFC2119 terms in uppercase
Malcolm Rowe
malcolm-what at farside.org.uk
Sun Aug 29 11:47:26 PDT 2004
Ian Hickson writes:
>> [RFC2119 terms - uppercase or not]
> 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.
I'd actually argue that it's a semantic convention, since it allows the
reader to distinguish between 'must' (the word) and 'MUST' (the RFC2119
term), which can be quite useful in a sloppy language like English. But
that's a shakey argument at best, especially since it's not formally
described anywhere (and RFC2119 doesn't count, since, as you've mentioned,
it's not explicit enough).
> Many, many specs (especially W3C specs) don't use uppercase.
I can't say I've noticed. Maybe I don't read enough specs? :-)
CSS 2.1 was the one I first noticed, and that has an explicit explanation at
the top. I thought it was rather clever.
> It now says:
> [snip]
> Is that ok?
Fine by me - it's almost identical to the CSS21 wording.
Regards,
Malcolm
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