Subject: Outlook incorrect parameter text

From: Mark Swanson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 13:33:33 -0500

Hello,

Can anyone confirm that this is non-conformant ICalendar:

DTSTART;TZID="Eastern Time (US & Canada)":20030114T100000

The parameter text ("Eastern Time (US & Canada)") MUST be *SAFE-CHAR:

     paramtext  = *SAFE-CHAR

     SAFE-CHAR  = WSP / %x21 / %x23-2B / %x2D-39 / %x3C-7E
                / NON-US-ASCII
     ; Any character except CTLs, DQUOTE, ";", ":", ","

It seems Outlook is creating parameters with the DQUOTE character, which is 
not correct.

Is this analysis correct?

Thanks.

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From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: 22 Jan 2003 14:13:18 -0500

On Wed, 2003-01-22 at 13:33, Mark Swanson wrote:

I think you're right.  On the other hand, it's a pretty easy violation
to accept, since you've got to have code to be able to parse
quoted-strings anyway, and since the TZID is purely local.

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From: Mark Swanson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 14:43:09 -0500

> quoted-strings anyway, and since the TZID is purely local.

Perhaps it is a mistake in the spec to use "paramtext" when it chould be 
"param-value" which would allow "paramtext" OR "quoted-string".

Thoughts?

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 14:58:17 -0500

This is a bug in the BNF   .. Should be param-value not paramtext
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Mark Swanson <[email-masked]> 
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01/22/2003 01:33 PM

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Subject
Outlook incorrect parameter text

Hello,

     paramtext  = *SAFE-CHAR

It seems Outlook is creating parameters with the DQUOTE character, which 
is 
not correct.

Thanks.

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From: Doug Royer <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 20:29:57 -0700

I think that someone else pointed to this in another way.
I seem to recall the real problem was that the ABNF
should have used 'param-value' and not 'paramtext':

      param-value        = paramtext / quoted-string

Should be:

      tzidparam  = "TZID" "=" [tzidprefix] param-value CRLF

So I think that Outlook is correct in spirit.

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 14:41:28 -0500

is 
> Is this analysis correct?

The analysis is correct.  TZID as a parameter is defined by:

     tzidparam  = "TZID" "=" [tzidprefix] paramtext CRLF

and paramtext is defined as:

     paramtext  = *SAFE-CHAR

I think that this was a mistake on the editors part when the did the ABNF 
for tzidparam.  The normal ABNF for property parameter values was:

so tzidparam SHOULD have been:

since the param-name part of the property parameter was fixed as "TZID". 
This may be a case where you want to special case tzidparam and possibly 
allow quoted-string values as well as paramtext values...  Your call 
though.

I think we should add a change to tzidparam to the RFC 2445 errata to 
allow for the ABNF that should have been there.  Who's tracking that now? 
Eric? Shannon?

Bruce
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From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 14:55:58 -0500

John responsed on 01/22/2003 02:13:18 PM:
> quoted-strings anyway

Sure, its easy to just tweak and tweak and tweak an RFC 2445 compliant 
engine to allow for 'minor' stuff like this but there has to be a limit to 
when you say that the poorly constructed generator needs to be fixed 
instead.

Granted the chances that Microsoft will fix Outlooks engine are not that 
great (do they even montior this list anymore??) but take it from someone 
who has to live with TONS of legacy tweaks; after a while the baggage of 
all the tweaking will catch up to ya and make you regret it.

Hmm, maybe Microsoft assumed that tzidparam was defined as "TZID" "=" 
param-value as I suggested elsewhere... Could it be they are ahead of us 
on this one?? ;^)

Bruce

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From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 15:01:04 -0500

[email-masked] wrote:

> engine to allow for 'minor' stuff like this but there has to be a 
> limit to when you say that the poorly constructed generator needs to 
> be fixed instead.

True.  Personally, though, I'd find it easier to accept quoted-strings 
everywhere, and have application logic validate the values instead of 
doing it in the parser.

I know that's not a universal opinion, though--when I offered to donate 
eCal's iCalendar parser to libical in 1999, Eric turned it down because 
it took that approach.  (My problem with having the parser validate 
everything is that it would choke on future extensions; IIRC, Eric's 
problem with not having the parser validate was that it would accept 
illegal constructs.)

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From: Mark Swanson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 09:31:55 -0500

On January 22, 2003 10:29 pm, Doug Royer wrote:
<snip>
> So I think that Outlook is correct in spirit.

LOL. Somehow I never envisioned "Correct in spirit" to be used wrt RFC 
compliance. I think I like it. :-)