From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Oct 20 1999 - 11:32:19 CDT
Currently, we have
Control-content = verb *( FWS argument )
verb = 1*( ALPHA / DIGIT )
argument = value ; (see 4.1)
[Observe that <value> reqires the use of a quoted-string if any
tspecials or NON-ASCII characters are involved. This is a restriction
on present usage, but follows Mime practice.]
I have 3 problems with this.
1. Should not the FWS be CFWS? Currently, we only forbid comments
in places where implementation speed might be critical, notably in
Newsgroups and Path.
2. Should not a verb be a token (that seems the current fashion for
keywords that have to be recognised by parsers)?
3. I am no longer so sure about the restriction to quoted-string. It
would mean for example:
Control: newgroup "comp.@*#@#*"
where @*#@#* is some collection of UTF-8 characters for some chinese
newsgroup. But we do not insist on quoting them in a Newsgroups line
(the syntax of <newsgroup-name> is quite clear, and I would expect to
re-use <newsgroup-name> when writing the syntax of the newgroup control
command). OTOH, it would be nice to be able to do a preliminary parse on
all Control commands by a single straightforward parsing process.
Note that I will likely change that syntax to have just one argument,
which might be composed of several values, but that is just for
convenience in the next chapter.
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Voice/Fax: +44 161 437 4506 Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5