Re: #1047 Path field delimiters and syntax - status

["Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In <Pine.LNX.4.53.0508221205170.17327@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> John Stanley <stanley@xxxxxxxx> writes:

>"Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>>Provided use of ':' is limited to IPv6Addresses only, I believe our view
>>is that the number of problems will be acceptably low (but we need to
>>point out the danger of using "dead", "beef", etc.).

>We can either solve the problem altogether or argue about what value of 
>"low" is "acceptably low". Why not just solve the problem altogether? 
>There is no immutable reason that colons must be allowed as anything but 
>separators. There is already a proposal on the table for how to deal with 
>IPv6 addresses that solves the dead::beef problem. Why is it not used?

There is a standard notation for writing both IPv4- and IPv6-addresses,
and the world will not thank us for not using them (cf. the resistance to
the IPv6 notation introduced by RFC 2821). So it is a choice of requiring
the world to use a non-standard IPv6 notation (which it might not do in
spite of what we write) or of accepting the small risk that some sites
might try to use barewords such as "dead" and "beef", which old
implementations might do strange things with.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx      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