Jonathan Kew wrote: I'm not opposed to an informative comment in the WOFF spec <http://people.mozilla.com/%7Ejkew/woff/woff-spec-latest.html>, noting that UAs MAY provide users with means to examine the metadata
Ah, but each use of the key word “MAY”, as RFC 2119 <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2119> defines it, actually presents two absolute requirements. The phrase “implementations MAY do x” is a convenient shorthand for the phrase “implementations MUST interoperate with implementations that do x; implementations MUST also interoperate with implementations that do not do x”.
Including a normative key word in a non‐normative (informative) comment is, at best, useless and, more probably, a source of confusion. I oppose such inclusion.
(The canonical version of RFC 2119, “Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels” <http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt> (plain text), has a derivative that is more useful <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2119> (HTML). The specification of WOFF as Jonathan Kew maintains it <http://people.mozilla.com/%7Ejkew/woff/woff-spec-latest.html> is not the specification of WOFF which the W3C received as a submission on 8 April 2010 <http://www.w3.org/Submission/2010/SUBM-WOFF-20100408/>; neither of those are a resource through which the W3C might publish a standards‐track specification of WOFF <http://www.w3.org/TR/WOFF>; none of those are another resource through which the W3C might publish a standards‐track specification of WOFF <http://www.w3.org/TR/woff>.)
