From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Oct 21 1999 - 13:54:20 CDT
In <FJyuCq.6B6@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
>Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
>> 1. Should not the FWS be CFWS? ...
>Backward compatibility problem. If you use:
> Control: newgroup (create this) comp.foo
>most existing servers will probably take that as a request to create a
>newsgroup named "(create" with flags "this)". We can say that servers are
>required to understand and ignore comments but aren't allowed to generate
>them, but I don't think we should go farther than that at this time.
Sure, but that applies to all the headers in News where comments are
currently not used, but our draft allows them.
But we already say somewhere in Section 4 that you MUST accept them, but
you have better not start using them for a long time yet. So we have
covered it as you said, but I see no reason to make an exception for
Control headers as opposed to the rest (Newsgroups and Path were
different, because there were reasons of efficiency).
>> 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.
>Reusing the syntax of the Newsgroups line makes sense to me; doesn't it
>already disallow whitespace in newsgroups? If so, provided the rest of
>the Control header is whitespace-delimited the way it is now, you can
>still do a simple preliminary parse.
Sure, you can't have whitespace in the middle of a newsgroup-name, and
parsing the Newsgroups line is no problem.
And if all arguments of Control headers were newsgroup-names there would
be no problem. But we may be inventing all sorts of new Control headers in
the future, and the syntax here is trying to set the framework for the lot
of them. Didn't Brad have some idea of making future Control meeages have
a more Mime-like structure?
But having said all that, I can still hack the syntax to work either way
we decide.
-- 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