On Wed May 11 2005 20:37, ned+ietf-822(_at_)mrochek(_dot_)com wrote:
The difference is that Internet Messages and MIME have a canonical form,
whereas Internet-Drafts and RFCs are not required to use CR characters
(and in fact do not in the IETF/RFC Editor archives). There are a
number of ways to handle this; I've suggested one. It's just plain
silly to require CRLF line endings on ABNF lines in an I-D or RFC whose
other lines use only a newline.
And on the system I use lines are stored as counted strings, padded to an even
byte. The count can be either big or little endian.
That's nice, but it's not the format of I-Ds and RFCs, which is where ABNF
is used. Those documents might or might not have CR. The recent IESG
statement
http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf-announce/current/msg01196.html
recommends automated validation, and an RFC 2234 (or draft successor)
parser will reject "ABNF" w/o CR (or, conversely, any "ABNF" parser that
does not reject content w/o CR is not compliant with 2234 et seq. and
cannot be used as one of the fully conforming implementations for the
purpose of advancing the specification to Draft), and is therefore
useless for validating ABNF in I-Ds and RFCs, since I-Ds and RFCs in the
IETF and RFC-Editor archives do not have CRs.