[uf-new] Re: Microformat for implementing RFC2119

[Dr Orlovsky MA]

On Fri, 10 Aug 2007 13:44:47 -0600, Scott Reynen wrote:

> On Aug 9, 2007, at 11:04 AM, Dr Orlovsky MA wrote:
> 
>> I. Background and the problem
>> ------------------------------
>> I've been looking into the possibility to semantically markup
>> RFC2119 [1] keywords (like MUST, SHOULD BE etc) in the HTML version of
>> some technical specifications. The problem is that none of the  
>> existing
>> HTML 4.10 and proposed HTML5 tags are suitable enough for this task.
> 
> It sounds like you just want plain old semantic HTML, not a  
> microformat.  Search-ability and style-ability, the two clear use  
> cases I see in your proposal, don't really require everyone to use  
> the same class names.  One person could use class="rfc-2119" and  
> another class="rfc2119" and both would be style-able and both would  
> be search-able (except that no existing search engines allow  
> searching on class names, as far as I know).  So I'm not clear why  
> this needs to be a community effort vs. just approaching individual  
> spec. publishers and asking them to improve their own markup.
>

I think that the proposed microformat definitely has semantic use case,
although it might be not so clearly indicated in my original post. There
are a huge amounts of documentation making use of RFC-2119 and this
documents are coming from different companies and communities. Thus, it is
much more more important to clearly semantically outline RFC-2119 keywords
throughout world-wide document flow then simply to style them. This is
just like rel-tag microformat marks all tags throughout blog posts and
articles or like datetime design pattern add sense to different date and
time representation. It should be noted, that several words/phrases can
satisfy the same RFC2119 term: for instance SHOULD NOT and NOT RECOMMENDED
both have the same meaning in terms of RFC2119. Thus, microformat
implementing the RFC2119 has clear semantic use (additionally to the
mentioned search- and style-ability) like rel-tag and
datetime-design-pattern. How does this microformat should
be implemented is the other question, which can be discussed separately
(may be the proposed b-tag form would not be appropriate)