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Re: abnf for <atext> in RFC 5321?

2011-05-12 10:59:04



On 5/11/2011 3:06 PM, Ned Freed wrote:
Exactly. I was a little surprised we don't have something about the use
of ABNF in the conventions section. I fully support putting that in and moving
the statement about where to find missing productions there as well.


In recent years, I've been coming to the view that a document's statements about imported definitions, rules, or the like should explicitly provide the details of what is being imported, and from where.

So a statement might be along the lines of:

     Terms used in this document that are defined in RFC AAAA:

        term1
        term2

     ABNF rules imported from RFC XXXX:

        rule1
        rule2

     ABNF rules imported from RFC YYYY:

        rule3
        rule4

This means that a search of the document, to find the definition of a term or rule or whatever will find this explicit text. No guessing or additional searching will be required.

At the same time, it does not suffer the dangers of repeated the actual text of of the definition, with its potential for divergence.

d/



--

  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net