I'm with Bill here: leave the document alone except where ambiguities
have been pointed out by the RFC editor. There aren't that many uses of
the word "phrase" in the document.
Tony
Bill McQuillan wrote:
On Thu, 2008-09-25, Pete Resnick wrote:
5322 (nee 2822upd) is in AUTH48. During this process, the editor
noted some confusion about some of the text: Sometimes when I say
(e.g.) "phrase", it's not clear whether I'm referring to the ABNF
terminal "phrase" or a description of it. It's somewhat easy to
distinguish, for instance, "a quoted string" from "quoted-string",
but other places it's trickier.
Quoting from RFC 5234, "Augmented BNF for Syntax Specifications", 2.1:
Unlike original BNF, angle brackets ("<", ">") are not required.
However, angle brackets may be used around a rule name whenever their
presence facilitates in discerning the use of a rule name. This is
typically restricted to rule name references in free-form prose[...]
This seems to me to allow angle brackets to be used in only those places
where it is needed to remove ambiguity.
If I understand you correctly, you have already found a small number of
places where ambiguity exists, so I would recommend changing just those
places.