I'm separating out these two issues, as I want to hear yeas and nays
(and explanations) from people other than Charles and Frank.
On 1/17/08 at 1:48 PM +0000, Charles Lindsey wrote:
[On quoted-pair in dcontent...]
...nothing useful is served by retaining those <quoted-pairs>,
certainly not in <msg-id>s. And <msg-id>s are hardly of use in the
email environment, except for threading using References, whereas
they are fundamental to the operation of Netnews.
And Frank, as well as myself, has consistently supported their
removal (and has just repeated his support in this thread).
So, there are two forms to this request:
1. Remove quoted-pair entirely from dcontent in the generate syntax
(meaning "[", "]", and "\" may never appear in dcontent).
2. Only allow the quoted-pairs "\[", "\]", and "\\" in dcontent in
the generate syntax.
Of course, quoted-pair would be in the obs- (interpret) syntax.
My personal opinion: #2 makes me queasy and I will argue tooth and
nail against it. If people are heavily in favor of #1, I won't raise
a stink, but I don't see the point: If you're writing a gateway from
e-mail to Netnews, you're going to have to go through the messages
looking for things you don't like anyway, so why not clean up these
along with everything else?
In any event, doing #1 is an easy edit. I just want to know what
people want to do.
[On space after the ":"...]
[Charles originally wanted:]
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.
[Frank suggested:]
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.
But if we can agree that a wording of some form along the lines of
what I and Frank are suggesting, then the exact wording can be
worked on by further discussion. As I said, either wording is netter
than nothing.
My personal feeling on this is again it is not necessary, and that a
gateway should be dealing with this anyway. But if people want text,
I would be OK with a non-normative note in either 2.2 or 3.6.
(Anything with a SHOULD I will make a stink over.) As editor, I'd
want specific text agreed to and instructions on where to put it.
Let's put these issues to bed.
pr
--
Pete Resnick <http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102