At 4:43 PM -0400 5/12/05, Sam Ruby wrote:
With that in mind, I suggest that the following are roughly equivalent:
atom:title MAY be empty, but be aware that if it is empty, the recipient MAY chose to ignore the entire entry.
atom:title SHOULD NOT be empty, lest the recipient choses to ignore the entire entry.
They are roughly equivalent with normal usage of those words, but in my mind, not with respect to RFC 2119. The latter does not give an implementer enough information to determine when he or she might want to include and atom:title, and when he or she might not.
Put another way, if I were implementing, I would understand the first one much more than I would understand the second one, even though the person writing the two thought they were roughly equivalent.
Also, as was pointed out to me earlier on this thread, it is not clear to whom these are addressed: Atom producers or Atom consumers. If read as-is by an implementer of consumers, the second one sounds more like an invitation to ignore than the first.
It comes down to judgment. And on matters of judgment, reasonable people will disagree.
+1
We have RFC 2119. We have Paul on record saying that if this actually is the will of the working group, scenarios such as these are appropriate uses of the word SHOULD.
Not quite. I think (I hope!) the essence of what I said was "you can use a SHOULD if you explain what the exceptions are". I don't think the example above meets that test.
With all this in mind, my suggestion is that we all calm down for a few days, and discussion things other than text elements.
+1
And when we do revisit this discussion early next week, lets not start with atom:summary, OK?
The co-chairs will attempt to find a different way to determine WG consensus on atom:summary than the current method, which is not working.
--Paul Hoffman, Director --Internet Mail Consortium
