With reference to:
http://www.imc.org/ietf-822/mail-archive/msg06171.html
I was asked to comment. I've reviewed the ensuing thread, but am not fully
aware of all prior discussion.
Pete Resnick wrote:
[On quoted-pair in dcontent...]
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.
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,
The coder in me would prefer (1) that escaping be applied consistently
*everywhere* in a message header, or (2) applied in as few different places as
possible.
Since (1) is a long gone option [*], I'd favour #1 in the absence of any
compelling reason to retain the escape chars in domains or message ids. I've
scanned the thread forward from this message and in a fair amount of discussion
have not seem any reason to keep these escapes. If not applied consistently per
option (1), escaping in message ids seems like a particularly poor option,
complicating as it does the very notion of identity comparison.
cf.
http://resnick1.qualcomm.com/draft-resnick-2822upd-04.html#addrspec
http://resnick1.qualcomm.com/draft-resnick-2822upd-04.html#ident
I agree with other comments that limiting to escapes to \[, \\, \], or simply
allowing \ as a non-escape character are not desirable options. The former
created yet another special case, and the I think latter has the potential for
great nasty surprises - the use of \ as an escape in this context is, I think,
just too deeply ingrained.
[*] Question for the reader: Is this still an implementation choice? I parse
headers by first running an unescaping pass over the entire header, then parsing
the resulting tokenized stream, I know I'll accept some headers that are
strictly incorrect, but do I end up mis-interpreting or rejecting any valid
headers? I'd like the answer to be No.
[On space after the ":"...]
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.
I agree that it's not necessary, but non-normative text is OK.
Reading this thread, it seems to me that this is a news/mail gateway issue and
not really applicable 'within the framework of "electronic mail" messages' (cf.
abstract), and as such the information might better belong in a separate
informative document about implementing mail/news gateways, which could do more
justice to a range of issues in this area.
cf.
http://resnick1.qualcomm.com/draft-resnick-2822upd-04.html#fields
http://resnick1.qualcomm.com/draft-resnick-2822upd-04.html#fielddefs
#g
--
Graham Klyne
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