Pete Resnick wrote:
[quotes rearranged]
---- Last Call now ?
Tony? I'm all for it.
Catch that runaway 2821bis, and maybe even Usefor.
Both are not directly affected by the fine prine
print of <obs-NO-WS-CTL> in <obs-dtext>. They
have their own ways of saying "no obs" or "no CTL".
[routes]
Which flatly disagreed with 822 on this point:
Yes, and my point was that this was always wrong
in the RFC 822 syntax. If you think that serial
commas work as expected in a route it is fine, but
"something" has to trim them for SMTP.
And we are talking about "something" that ignores
several SHOULD NOT in 2821bis and 2822upd. I have
no idea what happens if serial commas end up in
SMTP paths, stricty speaking this is a syntax error.
it was always the case that things which generated
821 commands from 822 headers had to do all sorts
of normalization. This one is no different.
Maybe. But it is "within" the address (or actually
the path), likely within angle brackets. Forgetting
to trim serial commas is a plausible bug, the place
where this might be rejected as SMTP syntax error
can be far away.
Normally I prefer to avoid such foreseeable trouble.
Of course agents trying to use routes are already
in so much trouble that nits are likely irrelevant :-)
text before the ABNF is always about syntax and the
text after the ABNF is always about semantics. See 3.1.
ACK - I missed that editorial rule in 3.1 on page 10,
its effect in 4.4 on page 33 is merely consistent.
[obs-empty-list]
its only reason for existing is the obsolete form of
group lists.
General, I love it if I can "see" an underlying concept
directly in the ABNF. I consider "ABNF-beautification"
as essential. RFC 822 never wanted to introduce ASCII
art by serial commas, it is just a silly side effect of
its #-rule.
2822upd reintroduces inadvertently lost parts of this
#-rule. The first attempt <obs-commas> highlighted the
aspect "this is some obsolete silliness with commas".
But this didn't reflect the spirit of RFC 822, where the
commas were only a side effect of its (liberal) #-rule.
Therefore you fixed the syntax for obsolete non-empty
lists, getting rid of <obs-commas> for non-empty lists.
In a certain sense you still have <obs-commas> hidden in
three cases of empty lists: <obs-group-list>, and in a
part of the ABNF in <obs-bcc> plus <obs-resent-bcc>.
There is no "group" in <obs-group-list>, in fact this is
no "group list". It's only a consequence of deprecating
serial commas, where you have to cover the pathological
case of an empty list.
And with <obs-empty-list> you could say it as it is:
| group-list = mailbox-list / CFWS / obs-empty-list
[...]
| obs-bcc = "Bcc" *WSP ":"
| address-list / CFWS / obs-empty-list CRLF
[...]
| obs-empty-list = 1*([CFWS] ",") [CFWS]
Ditto for <obs-resent-bcc>, and IMO it better expresses
the point of what's going on in these three cases than:
| obs-bcc = "Bcc" *WSP ":"
| address-list / (*([CFWS] ",") [CFWS]) CRLF
(*Shrug*) I just can't get excited about this one.
Getting excited about ABNF-beautification is my spleen.
Frank