ietf-822
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Re: Revisiting RFC 2822 grammar

2004-01-04 10:10:52

On 1/4/04 at 12:34 AM -0500, Bruce Lilly wrote:

I have an older version which does not have the encoded-word grammar (full text below).

Thanks for sending it.

From an implementor's perspective, I'd like to see all of the relevant base grammar (i.e. base field and supporting grammar) in a single document; indeed, one of the benefits of 2822 is that it consolidated most of the "... amends RFC 822" piecemeal details into a single document (obviously, the 2047/2231 amendments somehow didn't make it into
2822).

One of the rules we lived under during DRUMS (the WG that produced 2822) was that we would not include anything from MIME so that this document could (if it needed to) make it to full Standard before MIME did. (You can't make normative reference to standards lower on the standards track.) Once both the base mail format and 2047/2231 make it to full Standard, I think it would be wise to combine them into a single document.

I don't believe there is any harm in including the encoded-word grammar as
encoded-words appear in the higher-level constructs as alternatives to ccontent, word,
and utext.

Except that there would have to be explanation of these terms referring to 2047/2231. And this would surely be more than a simple syntactic change to 2822. I think this is out of the question.

pr
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Pete Resnick <http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
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