Hello Bruce,
Many thanks for your comments.
At 20:37 04/02/20 -0500, Bruce Lilly wrote:
Keith Moore wrote:
> As long as the field remains completely unstructured, I see no need to
> support comments. I'd probably change my mind if the field were changed
> to be, say, a list of URIs.
Comments are incompatible with URIs unless some quoting mechanism is used.
That is because URIs may contain parentheses, as in
http://users.erols.com/blilly/(foo)(bar)
See RFC2396 for URI syntax details. RFC 2369 quotes URIs in angle brackets,
which are not themselves allowed in URIs.
I have disallowed comments.
One issue to consider is long URIs. If comments are disallowed, no quoting
is required. URIs cannot contain whitespace characters, so a simple way to
handle a long URI is to allow a URI to be line-folded; it can be reconstructed
by unfolding and eliding any whitespace. To handle multiple URIs, a quoting
mechanism can be used where line folding and whitespace (but not comments)
are permitted within the quotes; the URI can be reconstructed as described
above. Comments could be permitted outside the quotes.
I have mentioned the length limitations of RFC 2822. I think the 78
limitation may be a bit tough in some cases, but the 998 limitation
should not cause any problems in practice.
Regards, Martin.