ietf-822
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Re: Revisiting RFC 2822 grammar

2004-01-15 21:26:50

On 1/15/04 at 7:09 PM +0100, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:

1. Bruce elimites obs-qp, even though it can match a few pairs quoted-pair cannot, such as "\" DEL.

Yup, I think that's Bruce's mistake.

2. I think I found a case in which Bruce permits CFWS where it wasn't before, although I cannot decipher my very cramped margin notes. It was something like "To: blah: (cfws) a(_at_)b(_dot_)org;".

2822 allows CFWS there.

3. The date syntax is reordered, and four-digit years seem to have disappeared from the obsolete syntax.

Nope. 2*DIGIT means 2 or more digits, which is correct.

4. obs-time-of-day looks wrong.

  obs-time-of-day = hour [CFWS] ":" [CFWS] minute [CFWS] ":" [[CFWS]
second]

Better:

  obs-time-of-day = hour [CFWS] ":" [CFWS] minute [CFWS] [":" [CFWS] second]

Yup, that looks better.

5. obs-received merits discussion on its own. RFC 2822 says

  obs-received = "Received" *WSP ":" name-val-list CRLF

which Bruce changes to

obs-received = "Received" *WSP ":" [CFWS] name-val-list [ ";" [CFWS] obs-date-time ] CRLF

An incompatible change, but perhaps correct.

Yes, I think Bruce fixes a bug in 2822 here.

6. I don't like Bruce's changes to subject. They mix in RFC 1036 syntax, which IMO does not belong in 2822.

I agree. These should be removed.

7. There may be a few cases where FWS in 2822 is replced by CWFS in Bruce's grammar. It's a little hard to tell. For example, in Bruce's grammar there always is CFWS following field-name ":", I'm not sure the same holds for 2822. It may.

I believe the only place where this is an issue is the Date: field, and he got that one correct. I see no problems on this one.

8. obs-domain-list is changed in a way I don't understand, from

  obs-domain-list = "@" domain *(*(CFWS / "," ) [CFWS] "@" domain)

to

  obs-domain-list = "@" [CFWS] domain *(1*("," [CFWS]) "@" [CFWS] domain)

This was a bug in 2822. It allowed "@example(_dot_)com(_at_)stupid(_dot_)example", where there is a required comma before the second "@".

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