Henry Spencer wrote:
On Mon, 3 Feb 2003, Bruce Lilly wrote:
However, RFC 1036 refers specifically and explicitly to RFC 822, *not* to
"RFC 822 or any update thereof". RFC 2047, like other post-822 updates to
mail standards, does not apply to news unless we make it so.
OK, guys, you heard Henry -- no more of that 4-digit year nonsense
in dates.
Yeah, right; everybody on Usenet is going to go back to 2-digit
years, just like it says in RFC 822.
We were talking about what the documents say, not about what is actually
being done on the net -- a gap that is particularly wide where non-ASCII
character sets are concerned.
Your claim, since you seem to have forgotten it, was that since RFC 1036
references RFC 822, MIME (an extension and amendment to 822) automatically
applies to news as well. Whether it *should* apply to news, and whether
it is being used *as if* it does, are separate (although related) topics.
Apparently the satire was too subtle. So here's the long version:
Just as RFC 1123 section 5.2.14 amended the 822 syntax for date, RFC 1342
amended the syntax for phrase and comment (and in the latter case with
far less impact on parsers, since an encoded-word still matches atom (in
word) in a phrase and ctext in a comment). We didn't have to wait for
2822 to say that date-time in a text message could use 4-digit years; as
soon as RFC 1123 took effect that was the case. For encoded-words, the
situation was simpler still; according to the *original* 822 syntax rules,
=?us-ascii*en-us?q?foo?= was always valid as a word in a phrase and in a
comment and in an unstructured field -- the 1342/1522/2047 amendments
simply clarified the interpretation of that text as an encoded-word in
those contexts.
And RFC 1036 does not *merely* _reference_ RFC 822, it is quite clear that
the text message format of 822 applies, even to the extent that where 1036
and 822 differ, 822 has priority and 1036 is deemed to be in error. See
the exact wording in RFC 1036 section 2, first paragraph.
Much of MIME is orthogonal to RFC 822, as explicitly stated in the MIME RFCs.
But it is quite clear that 1342/1522/2047 encoded-words definitely apply to
RFC 822 text message format, and there is no exclusion for news articles,
voice messaging, or any other specific *application* of that text message
format.