At 01:54 AM 2/7/99 +0000, D. J. Bernstein wrote:
Pete Resnick, over the objections of several implementors on DRUMS,
threw away the RFC 822 tokenizer. He wrote a new ABNF grammar that
Just to clarify this particular point: It is not uncommon to have
objections from one or more participants. So the fact of such dissension
is not automatically significant.
What matters is rough consensus, meaning a sufficient base of support for a
decision.
On the matter of removing the tokenizer approach, there was VERY strong
working group consensus.
The tokenizer was a nice idea for RFC733, attempting to provide a nice,
academically clean model. I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent
researching the topic while we were writing 733.
But it turned out not to work very well, because the mail header
environment has too much context sensitivity. All that academic purity
simply added confusion and, therefore, errors.
The DRUMS working group deliberated on this point quite carefully --
considering both retention and removal -- and the agreement to do the
removal was quite strong.
I'll also add that it is not only counter-productive to put the issue in ad
hominem terms, it is just plain wrong.
d/
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