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Re: draft-resnick-2822upd-02 and Netnews

2007-09-21 10:44:02

Charles Lindsey wrote:

 [magic SP] 
I think the best way around this problem would be to write in some
text such as:
 
| Although in all header fields the CFWS following the colon is
| optional, it is customary to place at least one SP there; moreover
| such a SP is mandatory in some related protocols (notably [NETNEWS]).
| In order to facilitate interoperability with such related protocols,
| that SP SHOULD normally be present.

I'd put it slightly different, AFAIK Netnews is the only case where
that's necessary, and structured header fields defined outside of
2822upd tend to use [FWS] instead of [CFWS] after the colon.  And
unstructured header fields like Subject: also use [FWS].  What I get is:

| Although all message header fields allow either [FWS] or [CFWS]
| after the colon, it is customary to place at least one white space
| character after the colon.  In NetNews articles [RFC xxxx] it's
| mandatory to use a space character after the colon, and in order
| to faciliate interoperability implementors might wish to separate
| the header field name plus colon from the header field body by a
| space in all Internet messages.

No SHOULD, and carefully avoiding the (in e-mail) sound cases "empty
header field body" or "colon immediately followed by a folding".  It
would even cover "HT doesn't help" without explicitly mentioning it.

{[NETNEWS] would then be an informative reference to the current
USEFOR draft, which has already passed IESG review.}

BTW, what happens if 2822upd is ready before USEPRO, could you (= the
USEFOR RFC editors) then still adopt a simplified 2822upd Message-ID
syntax in AUTH48 ?

At the moment we have something like this (proper subset relations):

For the local part (LHS) :  1036 < 2822upd-03 < USEFOR < 2822 < 822.
For the domain part (RHS):  1036 < USEFOR < 2822upd-03 = 2822 < 822.

For a 1738 news URL the RHS is still a host, not a domain literal,
let alone anything with "[", "\", "]", or NO-WS-CTL in a quoted pair.

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.
 
Agreed. I would like to get rid of quoted-pair in no-fold-literal even
if it is retained in domain-literal. I have no problem in allowing '\'
as an allowed character in no-fold-literal - just so long as it has no
semantic significance different from any other allowed character.

Let's better stay away from "\" outside of quoted-pairs, no special
exception for Message-ID, References, and In-Reply-To.  IMO it's good
enough to find something that makes sense everywhere (2821bis, 2822upd,
NetNews, news URIs, similar Content-IDs, Archived-At applications, the
In-Reply-To parameter for threading in mailto-bis URIs, and what else).

 Frank

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