US / Microsoft / Technical Specifications
Technical Specifications
Comment and rationale:
There are many uses of modal auxiliary verbs "MUST, SHOULD, MAY, must, should, may, recommended." These verbs have specific meanings for specifications/standards and affect interoperability and conformity to the specification. The specification does not define the meaning and implications of these verbs for implementations. See IETF RFC 2119/RFC 8174 and ISO/IEC Directives Part 2, Clause 7 for examples of the exact meaning of these terms with respect to implementations of standards (what is required, what is recommended, what is permitted, etc). If there is no explanation of these verbs, different implementations will interpret them differently and this will result in interoperability problems. Furthermore, words that are capitalized should always be defined; this is considered good practice. This problem is present throughout the specification and there are many cases where the lowercase version is used both in the normal English sense as well as the IETF RFC 2119 sense.
This standard is meant to be implemented by every party in a supply chain. Many supply chains are complex and span the globe. Without defining what these keywords mean, it will be open to interpretation regarding what is required, recommended, or permitted by the specification leading to interoperability problems. If there is an intention to submit this specification to ISO/IEC to transposition into an ISO/IEC standard then this issue will become important per the ISO/IEC Directives.
Proposed changes:
Clarify the meaning of these keywords by normatively referencing IETF RFC 2119, IETF RFC 8174, or ISO/IEC Directives Part 2, Clause 7. If IETF RFC 8174 is used, then only the capitalized keywords matter, otherwise all keywords matter. If only capitalized keywords matter, then any translation of this specification into languages that do not distinguish between lowercase and uppercase letters will lose this information. We suggest (1) using the ISO/IEC Directives as a normative reference, as they address translation issues that will arise around the world. This would also help if this specification were transposed into an ISO/IEC standard through the PAS process. (2) Scrutinize all occurrences of the keywords (regardless of case) and ensure that they have the ISO/IEC Directives meaning and not the regular English meaning. If a term is not meant to be a keyword, then rewrite it to use different words.
Page URL: https://untp.unece.org/docs/specification/
Name: Anish Karmarkar
Organisation: Microsoft
Country: United States