3. Schedule of Punishments

3. Schedule of Punishments

These punishments are applied after due consideration of infractions against the Principles and Rules. Because reaching IPP consensus takes time, the punishment often arrives late, especially when earlier flawed efforts are cited as examples for new work.

The Raised Eyebrow
Used for lesser infractions, including poor grammar, dangling participles, and inconsistent terminology.

The Frown
Reserved for more serious infractions, such as using an unregistered code point from an IANA-managed namespace, designing state tables with dead ends, or writing ABNF that no parser from 1993 could plausibly parse.

The Shaking of the Head
Reserved for complexity hidden away from view, including case-folding without Unicode considerations or marking critical behavior as implementation defined.

The Finger Wag
Reserved for the infractions described in [RFC4041].

The Head-in-Hand Gesture
A near-mythical punishment, rumored to have been invoked by the first greybeard who fully understood the implications of HTML/HTTP. Its gravity has kept it from ordinary use.