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

In <[email protected]> "Frank Ellermann" <[email protected]> writes:

>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.

I think the best way around this problem would be to write in some text
such as:

   Although in all header fields the CFWS following the colon is optional,
   it is customary to place at least one SP there; moreover such a SP is
   mandatory in some related protocols (notably [NETNEWS]). In order to
   facilitate interoperability with such related protocols, that SP
   SHOULD normally be present.

{[NETNEWS] would then be an informative reference to the current USEFOR
draft, which has already passed IESG review.}

That would still leave possible problems with an email header that was
folded immediately after that SP (as allowed by Email but forbidden by
Netnews), but I think we could live with that (it happens rarely, and
would only cause actual breakage in News systems if some intermediate
agent had discarded that trailing SP).


>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.

Agreed. I would like to get rid of quoted-pair in no-fold-literal even if
it is retained in domain-literal. I have no problem in allowing '\' as an
allowed character in no-fold-literal - just so long as it has no semantic
significance different from any other allowed character.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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