FlowDrop Workflow Specification 1.0

OPEN-25

Requirement words follow BCP 14 and are written in capitals.

What was open

The conventions used lowercase "must", "should" and "may", binding only inside a normative sentence. A reader could not tell a requirement from ordinary English without knowing which sentence was normative, and plain statements such as "answers 201" left open whether they were requirements at all.

Decision

The key words MUST, MUST NOT, SHOULD, SHOULD NOT and MAY are interpreted as in BCP 14 (RFC 2119, RFC 8174), and only when written in capitals. Every binding sentence of a rule carries one. The rules are re-cased in one sweep. The sweep changes wording, not requirements: where a re-cased sentence would require something the old one did not, the change is made by a ruling of its own.

Rules affected