Pete Resnick wrote:
There undoubtedly exists software within Netnews that will break if
this SP is absent...
... since it is the invariable practice within email MUAs to include
this SP, putting such a MUST in email would incur no problems...
[...]
Undoubtedly? Invariable? Use of these words *increase* rather than
decrease my suspicion, and therefore my desire to leave things
exactly as they are now.
The "magic SP" (mandatory SP after colon) in Netnews is a rather ugly
Netnews idiosyncrasy. It's not possible to change it decades after
RFC 1036. And it's IMO also not desirable to copy the "magic SP" as
is to 2822upd-03, example:
IIRC at the moment (RFC 2822) almost all structured fields use the
syntax "name:" [CFWS] more-stuff CRLF for some value of more-stuff
not starting with WSP or comments.
You can't simply insert SP between "name:" and [CFWS] because that
would invalidate any "name:" CRLF WSP folding immediately after the
colon. It would also invalidate "name:" HT with a HTab immediately
after the colon.
What you arguably could do is "name:" CFWS more-stuff with a mandatory
CFWS between colon and more-stuff. For unstructured fields using the
syntax "name:" [FWS] text you could likewise make the FWS mandatory.
IMO it's far more important to agree on a common Message-ID syntax
for mail and news than to fiddle with the "magic SP". Maybe you
could just mention the "magic SP" issue in a note for implementors
of mail2news gateways and for implementors of combined mail and news
UAs.
Wrt the Message-ID I'd be happy if we arrive at a syntax for the RHS
without quoted-pairs and without NO-WS-CTL. The approved USEFOR I-D
still allows \[, \\, and \]. Let's please get rid of this cruft, it
would be horrible in news-URLs (%5C%5B, %5C%5C, %5C%5D). Plausible
Message-IDs don't need quoted-pairs in the RHS. Please correct me
if you know a case (MIXER or similar) where that's not true.
Frank