RE: IRIP version 4 (Part 1) c

["Lisa Lippert (Dusseault) (Exchange)" <lisal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I haven't been at the CAP authors meetings lately, but that shouldn't matter
-- I don't recall seeing a consensus on the list or in the WG meeting that
the delimiters should not be defined.

Undefined strings are very scary for later versions of the protocol -- we
will hamstring ourselves for CAP 2 (or later) if we can't easily enhance
hierarchical functionality in calendaring.  Furthermore, interoperability is
threatened if different implementations understand different things from
different characters.  I'd like to see a character defined as a hierarchical
delimiter, even if implementations are not required to support hierarchies.
It will be much less painful in the long run if we define the character now.

We should also be very explicit about other possibly "special" characters
such as spaces, tildes, and whether they are meaningful, meaningless,
reserved, must be supported, etc.

Lisa

-----Original Message-----
From: sman@netscape.com [mailto:sman@netscape.com]
Sent: Monday, March 29, 1999 12:21 PM
To: John Stracke
Cc: calsch WG
Subject: Re: IRIP version 4 (Part 1) c


John Stracke wrote:

> Steve Mansour wrote:
>
> > Bruce_Kahn@iris.com wrote:
> >
> >> Good choice until that last part.  You should preclude some
> >> characters like
> >> '/' or <CR>, etc.
> >
> > Why?  You aren't suggesting a delimiter character are you? That would
> > imply some sort of structure. :-)
>
> Even if we don't have structure today, a delimiter permits us to *add*
> structure later if it turns out to be useful.

We went through that discussion a two of the editors meetings. The general
feeling is that it's a bad idea to put *any* sort of meaning into these
strings. Even a delimiter character.

-Steve