Dave Crocker wrote:
So let's hear what constraints and requirements folks deem
essential for this meta-syntax, and why. And given that the spec
already has a proposal, I'll suggest that anyone claiming it is not
sufficient would help things a lot by explaining why.
In general, the draft misses clear indications and guidelines for the
implementation. There is not even a single example. Let me quote an
implementor's perspective: "People should be able to take 5 minutes of
their time to briefly look through the document, see exactly what's
going on. Make it crystal clear, right up front, how you go about to
implement this, and leave the technical details and dry, formal
specifications, to some other part of the document."
Another point: Is it useful to retrieve the untagged mailbox value?
(E.g. could that be a way to patch, say, ezmlm?) If it is, it would be
helpful to have a syntax that delivers a good level of confidence that
a given token is a BATV-tagged representation of some tagging scheme
even if that was not known at implementation time. Should the
tag-types be loadable at runtime from some configuration file? Are
they case sensitive?