Re: quoted-pair in dcontent / Space after colon (Was: New 2822upd-04 - obs-NO-WS-CTL)

In <p0625011ec3b5dfaa7044@[74.134.5.163]> Pete Resnick <[email protected]> writes:

>On 1/17/08 at 1:48 PM +0000, Charles Lindsey wrote:

>[On quoted-pair in dcontent...]

>So, there are two forms to this request:

>1. Remove quoted-pair entirely from dcontent in the generate syntax 
>(meaning "[", "]", and "\" may never appear in dcontent).
>2. Only allow the quoted-pairs "\[", "\]", and "\\" in dcontent in 
>the generate syntax.

>Of course, quoted-pair would be in the obs- (interpret) syntax.

>My personal opinion: #2 makes me queasy and I will argue tooth and 
>nail against it.

Yes, I agree that #2 is a mess. But there are some other possibilities:

3. As an alternative to #2, allow "\" as a character in <dtext> in its own
right (but with no special semantic interpretation). I am not pushing for
that, but it would allow everything that is allowed at present, if people
care about that.

4. As an addition to any of #1, #2 or #3, make the change only in
<no-fold-literal>, leaving <domain-literal> alone.

But of those, my preference would still be for #1, or for #1+#4 as second
best.

> ... If people are heavily in favor of #1, I won't raise 
>a stink, but I don't see the point: If you're writing a gateway from 
>e-mail to Netnews, you're going to have to go through the messages 
>looking for things you don't like anyway, so why not clean up these 
>along with everything else?

Because, unlike MTAs and MUAs, you do not buy gateways "off the shelf".
Every gateway is, in practice, a hand-crafted script tailored for its
specific purpose. The WG's USEPRO document contains a long list of
'gotchas' to avoid when gatewaying to/from Netnews, and fixing syntactic
differences is way below the horizon in comparison with them. In fact,
writing the 'perfect' bidirectional gateway between news and mail that
will work in every conceivable combination of circumstances is just about
impossible.

In practice, such gateways are nearly always limited in scope. For
example, I gateway this list into a local newsgroup on my machine, and the
script to do it is just 19 lines of Bourne shell.

>In any event, doing #1 is an easy edit. I just want to know what 
>people want to do.

>[On space after the ":"...]

>>But if we can agree that a wording of some form along the lines of 
>>what I and Frank are suggesting, then the exact wording can be 
>>worked on by further discussion. As I said, either wording is netter 
>>than nothing.

>My personal feeling on this is again it is not necessary, and that a 
>gateway should be dealing with this anyway. But if people want text, 
>I would be OK with a non-normative note in either 2.2 or 3.6. 
>(Anything with a SHOULD I will make a stink over.) As editor, I'd 
>want specific text agreed to and instructions on where to put it.

Same answer as regards gateways. People writing ad hoc scripts are just
not going to bother to check for such unlikely circumstances.

I think it is clear (3 people against it) that the wording would have to
avoid "SHOULD". So here is a suggested wording avoiding 2119 language:


Although in all header fields the CFWS following the colon is optional, it
is customary practice to place at least one SP there; moreover such a SP
is mandatory in Netnews [UESFOR] (and possibly in other protocols).
Continuance of that practice by implementors is encouraged in order to
facilitate interoperability.


That could probably be tuned further.

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