Errors-to: owner-drums@CS.UTK.EDU
Date: Thu, 1 Jun 1995 14:58:07 -0700 (PDT)
From: Mark Crispin <MRC@Panda.COM>
Sender: Mark Crispin <mrc@Ikkoku-Kan.Panda.COM>
Subject: Re:  address syntax
To: Roger Fajman <RAF@CU.NIH.GOV>
Cc: drums@CS.UTK.EDU
In-Reply-To: <199506012144.RAA15686@CS.UTK.EDU>
Message-Id: <MailManager.802043887.19114.mrc@Ikkoku-Kan.Panda.COM>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII

On Thu, 01 Jun 1995  17:42:14 EDT, Roger Fajman wrote:
> Domain literals with colons inside the square brackets are certainly
> unambiguous syntax, but I don't know the effect on parsers in existing
> implementations.  It's likely that it will require some changes to any
> implementation to accept IPv6 domain literals, whatever the syntax, if
> they are allowed at all.

I think my parser would be happy if ":" was removed from the list of "domain
name specials".

However, this seems to me to be a good argument for eliminating specific rules
from 822 and SMTP about what a domain name/literal looks like; instead just
define the set of characters which are valid in a domain name/literal and let
some other specification define it further.

In other words, define domain in both SMTP and 822 as 1*dchar, where dchar
includes alphas, digits, "-", ".", ":", "[", and "]".  Declare victory, and go
home...

Otherwise, I fear having to deal with this again in IPV8, unless of course
IPV6 puts off IPV8 until after I retire, in which case I don't care. ;-)