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

Pete Resnick wrote:

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

The "magic SP" (mandatory SP after colon) in Netnews is a rather ugly
Netnews idiosyncrasy.  It's not possible to change it decades after
RFC 1036.  And it's IMO also not desirable to copy the "magic SP" as
is to 2822upd-03, example:

IIRC at the moment (RFC 2822) almost all structured fields use the
syntax "name:" [CFWS] more-stuff CRLF for some value of more-stuff
not starting with WSP or comments.

You can't simply insert SP between "name:" and [CFWS] because that
would invalidate any "name:" CRLF WSP folding immediately after the
colon.  It would also invalidate "name:" HT with a HTab immediately
after the colon.

What you arguably could do is "name:" CFWS more-stuff with a mandatory
CFWS between colon and more-stuff.  For unstructured fields using the
syntax "name:" [FWS] text you could likewise make the FWS mandatory.

IMO it's far more important to agree on a common Message-ID syntax
for mail and news than to fiddle with the "magic SP".  Maybe you 
could just mention the "magic SP" issue in a note for implementors
of mail2news gateways and for implementors of combined mail and news
UAs.

Wrt the Message-ID I'd be happy if we arrive at a syntax for the RHS
without quoted-pairs and without NO-WS-CTL.  The approved USEFOR I-D
still allows \[, \\, and \].  Let's please get rid of this cruft, it
would be horrible in news-URLs (%5C%5B, %5C%5C, %5C%5D).  Plausible
Message-IDs don't need quoted-pairs in the RHS.  Please correct me
if you know a case (MIXER or similar) where that's not true.

Frank