Date: 6 Mar 1996 23:40:03 GMT
Message-ID: <19960306234003.15437.qmail@koobera.math.uic.edu>
From: djb@koobera.math.uic.edu (D. J. Bernstein)
To: drums@cs.utk.edu
Subject: Re: Message format document outline

One ambiguity in RFC 822: it's not clear whether

   To: foo (comment) bar <user@host.domain>

is allowed.

The ``foo (comment) bar'' has to be a phrase, and ``phrase'' is defined
in the lower-level RFC 822 parser---where comments are significant---as
one or more atoms or quoted-strings.

On the other hand, RFC 822 claims that the lower-level parser is meant
to produce a sequence of tokens; ``phrase'' is not a token.

> New requirement: continuation line must contain non-whitespace character

I hope you're not trying to change the syntax here. Do you mean that
invisible continuation lines must be recognized but not generated?

> 	;; no free insertion of whitespace

You seem to be trying to change the rules in RFC 822 section 3.4.2. Has
this been discussed?

> obsolete-zone	::=		; MUST not be generated

MUST not? That's excessive.

I always generate GMT, even though RFC 1123 says I shouldn't. There are
many more programs that can handle ``GMT'' than ``+0000''.

(I _don't_ use the local time zone; the objective here is to make it as
easy as possible for UAs to parse Date fields.)

---Dan