Re: Issue 163, was: Meaning of invalid but well-formed dates

Brian Smith wrote:
>> That doesn't sound better to me, but that may be caused by me not being
>> a native English speaker.
> 
> "...defined in the RFC 5322 constructs..." means the definition is inside
> the construct. I thnk you meant "...defined in RFC 5322 for the
> constructs...".

Indeed. Fixed.

> The only instances of this problem are one-digit days in asctime-date (just
> prepend a zero to get a day), day-name-l (just drop all characters after the
> first three to get a day-name), and two-digit years. I doubt there is an
> interpretation of two-digit years commonly accepted by all implementations.
> Probably the most common implementation is to either ignore dates using
> rfc850-date format and/or return (400) errors when rfc850-date is
> encountered. That is what all my implementations do. Accordingly, I don't
> think support for rfc850-date should be a MUST- or even SHOULD- level
> requirement.

Yes, the 2-digit dates are a can of worms. This is a mess, we do both 
say "MUST accept", but then do not say what it means.

That being said, changing a normative requirement from RFC2616, even if 
it's underspecified, is something we shouldn't do lightly.

BR, Julian