Subject: Re: New Version Notification for draft-leiba-rfc2119-update-00.txt

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2016 10:14:52 -0700

draft-leiba-rfc2119-update-00 says:

> 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 don't get why reducing the number of reserved key words is a goal. It
doesn't seem to have anything to do with the main goal of clearing up
the confusion over capitalized versus non-capitalized, and it creates an
additional difference between documents that follow 2119 and those that
follow 2119-plus-update.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2016 20:24:28 -0400

--On Tuesday, August 09, 2016 14:33 -0700 Dave Crocker
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> On 8/9/2016 2:22 PM, Sam Hartman wrote:
>>  In general, I don't distinguish
>> between caps in running text, but all the screen readers I've
>> used (including even the one on Android) can distinguish caps
>> if you ask them too.

> I'd expect that change in screen reader mode to add quite a
> bit of noise the the output, as all the case changes are
> noted, where only a tiny number matter.  Low signal to noise
> like that seems likely to be distracting, at best.

Dave, 

Sam and others who use screen readers every day (and, I trust,
screen readers that match their needs) are much more important
than I am about this, but I have used screen readers from time
to time -- typically out of necessity at those times-- and the
knobs permit me to make settings that tell me about
ordinarily-capitalized words or not, punctuation or not,
completely capitalized words or not, etc.  So, if I set one up
that way, I can be told about MUST without being told that
"Sam", the first word in the previous sentence, starts with a
capital letter.

I don't think the draft has this quite right (see longer note
sent a short time ago), but, because I don't see the options as
limited to "case change" or not (which, would, indeed, be very
distracting in most texts), I don't see the screen reader
question as a powerful bar to what the draft suggests.

      john

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2016 21:57:30 -0400

--On Friday, August 12, 2016 18:13 -0500 Pete Resnick
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>...
> One last (and perhaps fruitless) attempt to keep this section
> and deprecate the adjectives:
> 
> Using REQUIRED and OPTIONAL results in exactly the problem of
> using passive voice anywhere: REQUIRED by whom? OPTIONAL for
> whom? If you say, "A MUST do X and B MAY do Y", it is
> perfectly clear which actor is responsible (and in network
> protocols there are inevitably at least 2). If you say "X is
> REQUIRED and Y is OPTIONAL", you'll end up needing more text
> to explain the actors and their roles.
> 
> Using REQUIRED and OPTIONAL is lazy. It makes specs less
> clear. They ought to be dropped.

Pete,

Just for the record, I agree that REQUIRED and OPTIONAL cause
more problems than they are worth and should be dropped.  But
doing so is (obviously) controversial.  It may be entangled with
a few other things, like the T/S <-> A/S distinction and the
terminology we should be using for them (and Experimental, BCP,
and procedural BCP, documents).   So, as a mostly-rhetorical
question, do you think that, if we were going to open one of the
many issues in 2119 that might reasonably be addressed but that
would be controversial, do you think those two words top the
list?  As another one, if the IESG simply told the RFC Editor to
make sure that, if REQUIRED or OPTIONAL appeared in a spec, the
relevant section needed to be completely clear, would that be a
road to solving the problem that would not require a change to
2119?  

Note that 2119 doesn't say those terms are allowed, only what
they mean if they are allowed and used. A decision that they are
allowed iff the authors can convince the RFC Editor that the
relevant specs are clear and that the usage is not lazy would be
completely consistent with that.

  best,
    john