Re: document status: 3028bis, body, editheader

> On Mon, 2006-03-20 at 22:59 -0800, Philip Guenther wrote:
> > I've made one tweak for the next rev to the wording in section 2.7.1
> > regarding ':match' and the definition of 'character'; I had overlooked
> > an off-list comment at the turn of the year.  The paragraph now
> > reads:
> >    The ":matches" match type specifies a wildcard match using the
> >    characters "*" and "?"; the entire value must be matched.  "*"
> >    matches zero or more characters in the value and "?" matches a single
> >    character in the value, where the comparator that is used (see 2.7.3)
> >    defines what a character is.  For example, the comparators "i;octet"
> >    and "en;ascii-casemap" define a character to be a single octet so "?"
> >    will always match exactly one octet when one of those comparators is
> >    in use.  In contrast, the comparator "i;basic;uca=3.1.1;uv=3.2"
> >    defines a character to be any UTF-8 octet sequence encoding one
> >    Unicode character and thus "?" may match more than one octet.  "?"
> >    and "*" may be escaped as "\\?" and "\\*" in strings to match against
> >    themselves.  The first backslash escapes the second backslash;
> >    together, they escape the "*".  This is awkward, but it is
> >    commonplace in several programming languages that use globs and
> >    regular expressions.
> I find the description of the awkwardness of "\\" highly amusing
> juxtaposed with the requirement of all tests in Sieve[1] to have the
> argument :comparator "i;basic;uca=3.1.1;uv=3.2" (and the matching
> "require" statement).
One man's meat is another man's poison... There are plenty of scripts that
depend on comparators continuing to work the way they always have.

  to be honest, I find it absurd that such verbiage
> is forced upon users.  we need to find a better way.
> [1] outside of the US of A, anyway.
This has nothing to do with geography and everything to do with backwards
compatibility. Some of the scripts I'm referring to were written and are used
outside the US.

And good luck using i;basic;uca=3.1.1;uv=3.2 to trap specific sequences of
illegal 8bit in headers. Such stuff is rarely if ever in UTF-8, in my
experience at least.

                                Ned