[DFDL-WG] RFC 2119 word usage in DFDL Spec

[Mike Beckerle]

In studying Tracker 304 https://redmine.ogf.org/issues/304  I have found
that there are many uses of words like must and should, which are not
specifically in accord with the notions of RFC 2119, because they are not
involved in statements about requirements.

For example, in section 2.3.1.1

Usually, the behavior of the unparser is symmetric to the behavior of the
parser; however, there are cases where the DFDL schema will accept several
equivalent representations for the same logical data. In this case it would
be ambiguous which of these equivalent representations should be produced
by the unparser. The DFDL standard contains representation properties which
are used to eliminate this ambiguity. It is a schema definition error if a
DFDL schema is being used to unparse data and there is any ambiguity about
the representation.


We can either ignore such issues, because the context doesn't require us to
consider this a requirement statement, or reword so as to avoid RFC2119
terms. I am not sure it is worth changing this prose in all the places
where this sort of thing happens. The word 'should' is less problematic
than the word 'must' of which there are hundreds of occurrences.


Thoughts?


Mike Beckerle | OGF DFDL Workgroup Co-Chair | Tresys Technology |
www.tresys.com
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