The RFC process seems to work quite well for defining and clearly documenting standards. But I simply cannot understand how this RFC adds any value. All it does

The RFC process seems to work quite well for defining and clearly documenting standards. But I simply cannot understand how this RFC adds any value. All it does is to define some words! By way of comparison, RCF 2119 has been a very successful and useful RFC. A naive reader might think that it simply defines some words, providing definitions for "SHOULD", "MUST", "MAY", "REQUIRED", and "OPTIONAL". But that is not the case... it does not provide _definitions_ for these words. Instead, it provides a standard describing how they are to be used in writing standards documents. Whether we like it or not, is a fact of the English language that "The document should end in a newline." can mean that it is optional but desirable for a document to end in a newline, or it can mean that a document ending in anything else would be invalid. But the sentence "The document SHOULD end in a newline.", appearing in a standards document that references RFC 2119 is not ambiguous -- 2119 specifies a particular protocol for use of these words. As far as I can tell, RFC 3092 has none of those redeeming qualities. It does not specify what a metasyntactic variable is, how to use one correctly, and which metasyntactic variable list to use... instead it just provides the definition and origins of "foo", "bar", and "foobar". A dictionary would be a better source for that, not an RFC.