(ge) Try not to depend on capitalization scheme for indicating a defined words.

[Nat Sakimura]

This is a general precaution, which is explicit in some other fora like ISO.

Defined terms shall only appear as defined terms and not in the dictionary sense without respect to capitalization etc. In many languages, there are no notion of “capital letter”, so if the document depends on it, it will be pretty hard to translate it.

FYI, ISO editor's guidance is available from here: https://www.iso.org/sites/directives/current/part2/index.xhtml

[Kristina Yasuda]

I think this applies to all OIDF specifications, and not only VCI document. If we want to enforce it OIDF-wide, could we have a WG discussion and agreement that we want to follow the ISO rules?

[Michael Jones]

I agree that we should not depend upon capitalization to identify keywords BUT in the English rendering of the specifications, we should continue to capitalize keywords to make them stand out to readers, as we always have done.

The action item I think we should take from this issue is to ensure that all keywords are defined in the Terminology sections of the specifications. Then, even if translated into languages without capitalization, it will be evident what phrases are keywords.

[Tom Jones]

perhaps what is meant by capitalization is emphasis - in other alphabets that could be created by bold type or font change as appropriate.

[Michael Jones]

This was discussed on the 12-Sep-22 working group call. Nat said that the point was that when a word is used as a keyword, try to not use the word as a non keyword.

Heather Flanagan cited RFC 8174: Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 2119 Key Words.