Nonstandard standards

2.5 Nonstandard standards

It should be noted that not everything in the software arena must be standardized. There may be preferred practices or suggested practices on which there is no agreement as to a single standard way to behave. In these cases, recommended approaches or guidelines may be appropriate.

A recommended approach can be seen as the preferred, but not required, situation. In that case, words such as should, ought to, or other similar, strongly suggestive phrases might be used. A guideline would be even less restrictive and use verbs like could, might, or may. Use of recommended approaches and guidelines permits some control of activity performance without unnecessarily restricting otherwise proper or beneficial behavior.