RE: NEW ISSUE: date formats in BNF and spec text, was: RFC 2616 Errata: Misc. Typos

ons 2006-12-20 klockan 13:56 -0800 skrev Travis Snoozy (Volt):

> This might be helpful if you were just scanning the BNF (or it could
> jog your memory if you saw obsolete-date somewhere), but I think that
> it doesn't quite deal with the "should we use rfc1123-date instead of
> HTTP-date in references?" question.

Which in effect is the question

Should HTTP-date be reduced into just rfc1123-date and replaced by it,
and the compatibility with the obsolete date formats moved to section
19.4, or should we try to clarify HTTP-date further.

For as long as the compatibility is in HTTP-date references must be to
HTTP-date as this defines the parser. If we move the compatibility to
19.3 and/or 19.6 then HTTP-date is no longer needed and replacing it by
rfc1123-date is sufficient.

But I dislike this as it makes it less obvious what formats the parsers
must support as we then have the situation that it's insufficient for
lexical parsing to follow the BNF and you must also read the notes to
define the lexical parser..

At least to me the current wording regarding HTTP-date is pretty clear
as it is. But then I am the kind of guy which actually considers
stressing this aspect of HTTP-date in each reference to be redundant and
not at all needed as it's already an MUST in 3.3.1, long before the
first reference or even the BNF definition of HTTP-date..

Regards
Henrik