Re: ABNF

On Wed May 11 2005 12:24, [email protected] wrote:

> and you had a concern about being able
> to determine from the grammar what rule a comment is attached to, which I find
> uninteresting since I reject the notion that comment binding needs to be
> determinable from the grammar.

1) that depends on the specific application. For example, topologically
   sorting rules in a ruleset -- keeping comments with the correct rules --
   requires being able to determine which rule (if any) a particular
   comment belongs to
2) in principle, the ABNF grammar shouldn't have such gross ambiguities
3) it's difficult to definitively state whether or not a particular
   implementation of ABNF parsing is fully "interoperable" (a requirement
   for Draft status) if one implementation does "comment binding"
   differently from another.  Granted, the Internet won't collapse, but
   there is a principle involved, and if we're going to ignore it for this
   specification, then we ought to be even-handed and ignore it for all
   specifications.

> Oh, and then there was the business about line terminators used in stored
> copies of specifications. This I also find to be of no relevance. It is well
> understood that local storage conventions vary but CRLF is our chosen canonical
> form for line terminators. Hopefully we can avoid another round of interminable
> discussion of this, repeating what happened with the MIME specification over 10
> years ago.

The difference is that Internet Messages and MIME have a canonical form,
whereas Internet-Drafts and RFCs are not required to use CR characters
(and in fact do not in the IETF/RFC Editor archives).  There are a
number of ways to handle this; I've suggested one.  It's just plain
silly to require CRLF line endings on ABNF lines in an I-D or RFC whose
other lines use only a newline.