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Re: [ietf-smtp] [dispatch] BCP proposal: regular expressions for Internet Mail identifiers

2016-03-28 19:20:08
On 3/27/2016 10:41 PM, Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:
On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 2:27 PM, Sean Leonard <dev+ietf(_at_)seantek(_dot_)com <mailto:dev+ietf(_at_)seantek(_dot_)com>> wrote:


           But the terminology needs to be clarified
        at some point:  a single document (or sentence) is either
        normative or
        not.  If something is a "best common practice", it is not
        normative, the
        rules are set somewhere else.


    IETF Process issue:
    Well, RFC 5646/BCP 47 "Tags for Identifying Languages" is a BCP.
    However, it is referred to normatively by a slew of Standards
    Track documents. I would propose that this document be seen in a
    similar light. One would not expect the Mail Standards to adopt
    these regular expressions, but other standards that use regular
    expressions for e-mail would probably do best to refer to this
    document. Examples include CBOR/CDDL
    (draft-greevenbosch-appsawg-cbor-cddl), and DNS/NAPTR records
    (RFCs 3401-3404), when the subject matter is e-mail stuff.


It seems to me RFC2026's definition of BCP would cover what you're trying to do here.

And if what you're really producing is regular expressions that match anything that the ABNFs in the mail RFCs will legitimately produce, you might want to do a standards track document that explicitly updates those documents where those ABNFs are listed.

BCP or Standards Track are fine by me.


Then again, I could see this just as easily going Informational since it's unlikely (to me, at least) that anyone will point compliance language at such a document.

They said that for RFC 4627, too. :)

I will make this easy: not going to pursue Informational status. I foresee compliance language referring to these regular expressions: if not in the IETF, then in other bodies. Any software library that has Internet + regular expression capabilities, would be an example. Consider, for example, the POSIX standard, and the C++ standard library standards. It would be reasonable for web browers/ECMAScript/HTML/DOM to offer e-mail address validation capabilities at some point in the future, with polyfill to fill in older implementations.

Oh wait, they already do that...and badly:
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/forms.html#e-mail-state-(type=email)

BCP seems like the best choice.

Sean
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