RFC 8174

Stefan,

Thanks for calling my attention to RFC 8174, which updates RFC 2119 by clarifying that the normative keywords have their special meanings only when they are in UPPERCASE, and that when they are in lowercase, they have their “normal English meanings.”

That is indeed the way the spec is currently written. There are several places where I use (for example) “must” in a non-normative way. For example, in Section 3.17.15, “baselineState property”, I write:

To assign a value to baselineState, a tool must have a way to determine whether a result is “the same”, in some sense, as a result that appeared in the baseline.

I was glad to read RFC 8174, because I always felt bad about writing a sentence like that, and now I don’t have to feel bad about it anymore!

Accordingly, I have updated the Terminology section of the spec to use the language from RFC 8174:

      The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL

      NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED",

      "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as

      described in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they

      appear in all capitals, as shown here.

I filed Issue #79: “Editorial: Cite RFC 8174 in Terminology section” to track this change. I made the changes in the change draft: Documents\ChangeDrafts\sarif-v2.0-issue-79-rfc-8174.docx. You can use Word’s “Next change” feature to find the changes. I then merged the change into the provisional draft: Documents\ProvisionalDrafts\sarif-v2.0-wd02-provisional.docx.

Larry

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