From: Usenet News Support (support@prodigy.net)
Date: Wed May 21 2003 - 09:48:55 CDT
On Tue, 20 May 2003, Pete Resnick wrote:
> On 5/20/03 at 12:15 AM -0400, Bruce Lilly wrote:
>
> >Pete Resnick wrote:
> >>How about the table in 3.6?
> >
> >That refers to the number of each type of field, which hs nothing to
> >do with the topic under discussion, viz. the ABNF which describes a
> >field's syntax.
>
> I thought we were talking about syntactic statements in the text that
> supplement the ABNF, providing further restrictions.
>
> >>There are some things that are required for interoperation that are
> >>impossible (or at least really difficult) to put in the ABNF.
> >
> >Yes, but the issue under discussion isn't one of those.
>
> No? I think the issue under discussion was whether it was reasonable
> to have a restriction on top of the ABNF saying that there can't be
> all white space followed by a CRLF after the ":" in a header field.
> That sounds like exactly what I was referring to.
What is the justification for forbidding this (other than that's the way
some programs work)? It would seem that a real-world client might find
that a single message-id would take most of a line, and thus leave
"References:" on a line by itself. Just because we allow long lines
doesn't mean clients are forced to use them.
Ex:
References:
<big.long.id@silly.long.name.in.deep.subdomain>,
<another.long.message.id.here@another.silly.host>
Either we allow header continuation or not. Clearly we should require some
non-blank content on the line, but the header name satisfies that.
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