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Re: I-D ACTION:draft-malamud-subject-line-00.txt (fwd)

2005-02-01 16:54:47

Hi -

Section 2 discussion of encoded-words (top of page 5) is missing
RFC 2231 language identifiers (RFC 2047 is amended by errata (and
one erratum itself has an error, corrected by another erratum) and
by RFC 2231 (which also has errata)). RFC Errata may be found at
the RFC Editor web site: http://www.rfc-editor.org/cgi-bin/errata.pl


I'll add the language identifiers pointer ... thanks.  I'm not sure
about pointers into the various errata ... I may just make those
part of the footnote.  

Same section: mention should probably be made that encoding indication
characters are case-insensitive.


Not central to the point, but I'll point that out.   Thanks.

Same section: re. "resort to a variety of strategies", note that
conforming implementations are limited to the actions specified in
RFC 2047 section 7.

Thanks ... I'll make that clearer.


Section 5 is where things go really bad.  Section 4 correctly points
out the fact that the Subject header field is intended for human
consumption, and is therefore unsuitable for label cruft. However
wrong such cruft is, the section 5 recommendation to put similar
cruft in RFC [2]822 comments ("human readable informational text";
RFC 2822 section 3.2.3, also "ignored by the formal semantics";
STD 11, a.k.a. RFC 822, section 3.4.3) in Received fields ("intended
for humans"; STD 3, a.k.a. RFC 1123 section 5.2.8) is triply wrong.


Ah, well, it went triply wrong on another watch.  That issue was
actually the subject of considerable thought in the drafting of
rfc 3865.  Ned Freed suggested we put it in the comment field, and
I ran that through a lot of people, and they all agreed that
was the proper place.  (For example, my original draft had multiple
no-solicit headers, and an mta could introduce one, but Keith
Moore very rightly pointed out what a bad thing that would be).

It could be 3865 is such a bad thing that pointing to that as the
best alternative is overkill.  But, I'd want to hear that from
quite a few folks ... the reason I wrote this current bcp-like draft
is because I heard from a whole bunch of people that they were
very happy to get mta's and mua's out of the subject munging
business.  The way the received: fields works made it through
a half-dozen drafts, a last call, and publication.  That seems like
an awful lot of work to revisit.  :)

Regards,

Carl


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