> If strings are always unambiquously detectable, why allow quoting them at all?
Because strings can contain whitespace and other structural characters that would confuse a parser.
> Having two representations for the same data means you can't normalize a document unambiguously.
The document will always be normalized unambiguously in binary format. The text format is a bit more lenient because humans are involved.
The idea is that the binary format is the source of truth, and is what is used in 90% of situations. The text format is only needed as a conduit for human input, or as a human readable representation of the binary data when you need to see what's going on.
> An important feature of RFC2119 keywords is that they're always capitalized (ie. the keyword is "MUST", not "Must", or "must").
Because strings can contain whitespace and other structural characters that would confuse a parser.
> Having two representations for the same data means you can't normalize a document unambiguously.
The document will always be normalized unambiguously in binary format. The text format is a bit more lenient because humans are involved.
The idea is that the binary format is the source of truth, and is what is used in 90% of situations. The text format is only needed as a conduit for human input, or as a human readable representation of the binary data when you need to see what's going on.
> An important feature of RFC2119 keywords is that they're always capitalized (ie. the keyword is "MUST", not "Must", or "must").
Hmm good point. I'll add that.