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: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 10:17:17 -0700 (PDT)

Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

>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.....

While that may have been your intended point, that's not what you said. 
You said:

>anyone who generates something permitted
>by the ABNF even when it's explicitly forbidden by the accompanying text
>is certainly not exhibiting good judgment.

That 'even when' tells me you think it is explicitely forbidden to use ':' 
in path identities, not that we need to make it explicitely forbidden.
We are talking about someone doing something based on USEFOR-04, not
some unknown future version.

>Attempting to return to the problem at hand, rather than the discussion on 
>how to discuss these things - John, can you educate me a little bit about 
>USENET feeds?

I wrote:

>... the same failure that would make the dead:beef admin an
>idiot would make both of these people idiots. 

The point was that if the admin of "dead:beef" is an idiot for using a 
path-identity containing colons (which he is told is legal by USEFOR-04),
then people who use IPV6 address-literal path-identities which can parse 
into other previously valid path-identities using RFC1036 parsing are
just as much idiots, because the problem is the same. Whatever that 
problem is. And I think it was Russ who explained it.