Off-topic: Re: Comments on Auth 2.0 - Pre-Draft 11

[Gavin Baumanis]

Joaquin / Josh, 

I clearly see the position you both have here.
Overusing verbs can certainly lessen their importance within any
document.
And by the very nature of the work the community is doing and the
people it involved, and the people likely to use the specification - it
is "pretty safe" to say that anyone reading the document is going to
have a level of reading comprehension that should make it irrelevant
which we way go. - I personally haven't wondered whether something was a
MUST have of not - I thought it was always clear enough.

But you never know who will end up reading the document and for what
purpose; and with that in mind, 
I'm going to have to +1, inline with Joaquin's perspective on this
one.

As the new guy - it leaves no doubt in my mind at all as to what MUST
happen.
And if I can get all the MUST HAVES implemented - then surely I SHOULD
have a working implementation of the specification.


Gavin Baumanis
RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

>>> On Friday, December 15, 2006 at 08:55, in message
<34714aad0612141355t6fc1182fy14a6f2cbe50b9b99 at mail.gmail.com>, "Josh
Hoyt"
<josh at janrain.com> wrote:
> On 12/14/06, Joaquin Miller <joaquin at netmesh.us> wrote:
>>> I have changed that text from "needs to" to MUST, although I think
that the
>>> sentence before that (The end user's input MUST be normalized into
an
>>> Identifier) is pretty unambiguous.
>>
>>  I feel this is an excellent change.  This style should be followed
>> throughout.
>>
>>  The problem with 'needs to' and 'MUST' in the same document is that
it
>> leaves the reader this little puzzle to puzzle over:  What is the
normative
>> difference between 'needs to' and 'MUST'?  Why is 'needs to' used
here and
>> 'MUST' there?  Is 'needs to' weaker than 'MUST'? Is 'needs to'
stronger than
>> 'SHOULD'?
> 
> I doubt that the "needs to" wording would have ever caused any
> problems with implementation. The sentence before states that you
MUST
> normalize the input. The "needs to" was describing a condition that
is
> necessary to check in order to perform the normalization. Anyone who
> was attempting to implement the normalization algorithm would see
that
> it is necessary to determine the type of the input before
continuing.
> 
> I think that words like MUST and SHOULD are not necessary when
> describing how to do something whose importance has already been
made
> clear (by a MUST, etc.). I have a hard time reading prose that uses
> those words excessively, because if they are over-used, they become
> noise ("you already said I MUST normalize").
> 
> Anyway, I think the OpenID 2.0 Authentication specification is
pretty
> consistent about using the appropriately strong wording when it's
not
> already clear whether something is required, so I think this
> discussion is mostly academic. Feel free to make requests if there
are
> specific parts whose compliance is not obvious.
> 
> Josh
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