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Re: Last Call: Message Disposition Notification to Draft Standard

2002-01-21 13:10:03
At 05:46 PM 1/18/02 -0500, The IESG wrote:

The IESG has received a request to consider Message Disposition
Notification <draft-vaudreuil-mdnbis-01.txt> as a Draft Standard,
obsoleting RFC2298, currently a Proposed Standard.

My apologies for this late comment...

[[[
  2.2 The Disposition-Notification-Options Header

     Future extensions to this specification may require that information
     be supplied to the recipient's MUA for additional control over how and
     what MDNs are generated.  The Disposition-Notification-Options header
     provides an extensible mechanism for such information.  The syntax of
     this header is

       Disposition-Notification-Options =
                 "Disposition-Notification-Options" ":"
                                disposition-notification-parameters

       disposition-notification-parameters = parameter *(";" parameter)

       parameter = attribute "=" importance "," value *("," value)

       importance = "required" / "optional"
]]]

The syntax of "parameter" requires that a value always be present, even when none is needed. I have been involved in the design of MDN extensions for which it has been necessary to "invent" a dummy value to satisfy the syntax; e.g.

[[[
     Disposition-Notification-Options:
         Alternative-not-available=required,(TRUE)
]]]

Here, the value '(TRUE)' is a dummy that serves no purpose other than to satisfy the above syntax.

An alternative syntax might be:

[[[
       parameter = attribute "=" importance *("," value)
]]]

in which case the above example might be:

[[[
     Disposition-Notification-Options:
         Alternative-not-available=required
]]]

#g


------------------------------------------------------------
Graham Klyne                    Baltimore Technologies
Strategic Research              Content Security Group
<Graham(_dot_)Klyne(_at_)Baltimore(_dot_)com>    <http://www.mimesweeper.com>
                                <http://www.baltimore.com>
------------------------------------------------------------



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