From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Sep 04 2000 - 04:43:16 CDT
In <yl1yz3amr3.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
>and just use the colon as part of the value since it doesn't change. If
>whitespace is allowed around the equal sign, that can be dealt with
>although it's annoying. Comments are right out. If we're going to allow
>spaces in posting-host, then it should *always* be quoted so that the
>parse can be easy; sometimes quoted and sometimes not quoted is much more
>annoying to deal with.
The whitespace and comments are there because they are there in all our
headers (except Newsgroups and Path, which we singled out). Indeed,
comments regularly appear in X-Trace. So if you want to single this new
header out as another special case, then we have to discuss it.
The alternative is to pass the whole header through an
"unfolding/de-commenting" process before trying to parse it. This is
probably a useful tool to haver available for other headers, too.
>It may be worthwhile calling the field something more generic, like
>"identity", and just recommending the posting host be used as the default
>value in the absence of something better.
I was trying to have a very specific syntax for each parameter (see my
reply to Clive). So "identity" would be a different header with a
different syntax. Remember that all these headers are optional, so the
injector includes just those which it considers appropriate to its
situation.
-- 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