Conformance and interoperability

Perhaps someone with 
more experience setting standards that I can help me - this TC is my only 
exposure to such work - but after looking into the RFC everyone subscribes to 
regarding key words for requirement levels - http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt - 
in order to review the "Specialization..." section of our draft 1.2 
architectural spec, I must admit I'm a bit confused by some of what we seem to 
be doing in it.

 

The RFC says such 
imperatives "must not be used to try to impose a particular method on 
implementors where the method is not required for 
interoperability."

 

So I take it that as 
long as my implementation can supply DITA-compliant XML document instances to 
another party - and accept such instances from them - this TC has absolute no 
right to legislate the particular mechanisms I use to do 
that.

 

For example, I may 
map DITA elements and attributes onto an entirely different XML vocabulary and 
process this non-DITA vocabulary using an architecture of my own design, and so 
long as I transform them back to DITA before sending them off - I've fulfilled 
my end of the interoperability bargain.

 

Is that everyone's 
understanding here?