From: Chris Newman (Chris.Newman@innosoft.com)
Date: Tue Nov 11 1997 - 17:34:37 CST
Note that discussions on what should go in the revised 821/822 documents
have to be sent to drums@cs.utk.edu (subscribe at
drums-request@cs.utk.edu).
My personal impressions from discussions that have happened in DRUMS so
far:
On Tue, 11 Nov 1997, Charles Lindsey wrote:
> Simon Lyall <simon@darkmere.gen.nz> wrote:
> >Could I have a list of places that we do *not* want CFWS ?
>
> 1. Inside of the <...> in a message-id.
Looks like this will happen.
> 2. Inside of an address , or inside of <address> if the "<..>" are
> present. Note that DRUMS currently allows
>
> To: "Fred D. Bloggs" CFWS < CFWS fdbloggs CFWS @ CFWS domain.com CFWS > CFWS
>
> No objection to the first and last CFWS in that.
I suspect a SHOULD NOT generate CFWS in those places will succeed, but I
doubt these will be disallowed both because they'd uglify the formal
syntax and because there are legitimate reasons to fold in the middle of
an address. Specifically, the local-part can get very long with X.400
gateways and other such beasts, so the line won't fit in 80 columns unless
CFWS is put around the "@". MUAs will wrap lines at the "@" in these
situations, so news clients should be able to deal with folding in an
address.
Note that 822bis does forbid generation of the following forms:
foo CFWS . CFWS bar @ domain.com
"foo" CFWS . CFWS "bar" @ domain.com
> 3. Inside of a date-time, though it is actually recommended to include a
> comment at the end with the a human-understandable timezone, as in
>
> Tue, 11 Nov 1997 11:05:02 -0500 (EST)
>
> Thus, we suggest all the other *CFWS in date-time should become *WS.
There may be some resistance to this -- mostly because it will make the
spec longer if we need two versions of the date/time specification.
> Note that, for news, we also have to recognise some obsolete formats such
> as Tue, 11 Nov 1997 11:05:02 GMT (GMT) and also some ancient UNIX formats
> that we discussed (does anybody have the details).
Email interpretors have to accept that form and all other forms in RFC
822, including two-digit years. They *don't* have to accept the unix
"ctime()" format as it's been illegal since at least 1977.
Personally, I think the news standard should drop all reference to Unix
ctime() format since it has been illegal to generate since 1987 (when 1036
was published).
> 4. All other comments, except after addresses and date-times.
Probably won't happen.
- Chris