Re: draft-resnick-2822upd-02 and Netnews

On 7/30/07 at 11:32 AM +0000, Charles Lindsey wrote:

>It would probably be helpful for a start to state clearly that what 
>is actually written in a domain literal (whether in an address or a 
>mesg-id) MUST/SHOULD agree with the specification of some widely 
>recognized numbering/routeing scheme (which, at the moment means IP4 
>or IP6 of course).

Why can't that be done in the documents which define where these 
things get used, thereby limiting dependencies.

>However, suppose some future addressing scheme _does_ admit quoted-pairs

First off, let's note that it is not the addressing scheme that 
admits quoted pairs; it is the representation of those addresses in a 
message. Things that interpret those addresses parse out the quoted 
pairs (and square brackets and the CFWS for that matter) to get the 
address.

That said, imagine that it makes perfect sense for a new addressing 
scheme decides to use a special other than "." in a domain literal, 
and it further turns out that parsers do bad jobs if those characters 
are not quoted. We might want to encourage the use of quoted pairs in 
those cases.

And again, I can't get all that excited (without some real examples) 
about implementations that can't go through a text string and unquote 
quoted pairs.

>There undoubtedly exists software within Netnews that will break if 
>this SP is absent...
>... since it is the invariable practice within email MUAs to include 
>this SP, putting such a MUST in email would incur no problems...
[and later]
>There undoubtedly exists Netnews software which will break without 
>that whitespace...
>
>Yes there are undoubtedly news implementation that would break in 
>that situation...

Undoubtedly? Invariable? Use of these words *increase* rather than 
decrease my suspicion, and therefore my desire to leave things 
exactly as they are now.

pr
-- 
Pete Resnick <http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
QUALCOMM Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102