Subject: Re: NEW: Path field delimiters and components; also #1003 USEFOR 3.1.3 - Resolution of msg-id issues

From: John Stanley <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 10:25:29 -0700 (PDT)

Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>While name-calling is not a good idea even when the person one is 
>insulting cannot be identified, anyone who generates something permitted 
>by the ABNF even when it's explicitly forbidden by the accompanying text 
>is certainly not exhibiting good judgment.

I've read section 3.1.6 (Path) three times now, and I find no prohibition
of any kind against a path-identity that contains a colon. Since 3.1.6 is
the "accompanying text" to the ABNF I quoted, I would expect any
prohibition to appear therein, and it does not. What "explicit"  
prohibition do you see in 3.1.6, or are you reading something other than 
draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-04.txt as found on the IETF website?

Now, RFC1036 tells us that currently a ':' is a punctuation character and 
will be treated as a separator, and thus while it is not prohibited in the 
path-identity it will result in incorrect parsing of the path header 
field. 

I also see that UUCP does not prohibit colons in node names, although I 
found none in the last copy of the UUCP maps I have on hand. My archaic 
HDB UUCP system seems quite happy to know about a site called "ded:bef", 
and will spool items up for that site, but perhaps the failure will come 
when an actual transfer is attempted. 

So, calling someone an "idiot" for doing something explicitely allowed in 
the standard is patently wrong and offensive to every person who would try 
to conform to our standard. After all, "conform and be an idiot" is a very 
negative message to send.

Henry Spencer <henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> jumps in:

>A bit of background you might not be aware of:  in some earlier
>discussions (on other topics), it was surprisingly difficult to convince
>some participants that such accompanying text is actually part of the
>standard, not just helpful commentary or advice to implementers. 

No, what was hard to accomplish was to justify the ABNF and the text
saying contradictory things. Your snide comment could be viewed as 
insulting, were this a group where insults weren't allowed.

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 08:57:31 +0200

> draft-ietf-usefor-usefor-04.txt as found on the IETF website?

I think my point was that given that the colons in IPv6 literals are known 
to cause problems, and so far, no prohibition or warning is in the text, 
the standards writers (that's us) haven't exhibited good judgment.....