On Thu, 02 Jul 1992 17:23:18 -0700, Marshall Rose wrote:
I still think that the tspecials thing borders on the gratituous! (-:
OK, please tell me how I am supposed to parse:
Content-Type: MULTIPART/MIXED; boundary=foo.bar
MIME says that the boundary delimiter is `foo', and the `.bar' is gratuitous
crud. This is because tspecials (`t' as in token) terminate the parse at the
dot. The correct form is:
Content-Type: MULTIPART/MIXED; boundary="foo.bar"
but not all implementations are doing this now, and more broken ones may be on
the way.
If you say I should parse the bogon as having a boundary delimiter of
`foo.bar', then you have just agreed to my change to tspecials.
Some history: I invented tspecials (`token specials') in the BNF I wrote for
MIME back in the early days. RFC-822 specials weren't suitable, since there
were additional characters that we needed to forbid in unquoted MIME tokens.
I expressly did not include dot in tspecials, so that it could be used
unquoted. For some reason it was added, and now there are interoperability
problems.
-- Mark --