Must and should wording in the DITA spec

[Kristen James Eberlein <kris@eberleinconsulting.com>]

I've started working on cleaning up the "must," "should," and "may" wording in the spec. I need feedback about the following paragraph from the conref topic (highlighting added):

If the referenced element has a @conref attribute specified, the above rules should be applied recursively with the resolved element from one referencing/referenced combination becoming one of the two elements participating in the next referencing/referenced combination. The result should preserve without generalization all elements that are valid in the originating context, even if they are not valid in an intermediate context. For example, if topicA and topicC allow highlighting, and topicB does not, then a content reference chain of topicA->topicB->topicC should preserve any highlighting elements in the referenced content. The result, however it is achieved, must be equivalent to the result of resolving the conref pairs recursively starting from the original referencing element in topicA.

You can read the paragraph in context at http://docs.oasis-open.org/dita/v1.2/os/spec/archSpec/conref.html#conref

My sense is that either all words need to be "must" or all three need to be "should" -- not the above mixture. Thoughts?

--
Best,
Kris

Kristen James Eberlein
Principal consultant, Eberlein Consulting
Co-chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
Charter member, OASIS DITA Adoption Committee
www.eberleinconsulting.com
+1 919 682-2290; kriseberlein (skype)