Re: New Version Notification for draft-nottingham-structured-headers-00.txt

> On 31 Oct 2017, at 9:24 am, Alex Rousskov <rousskov@measurement-factory.com> wrote:
> 
> On 10/29/2017 06:57 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote:
>>  https://mnot.github.io/I-D/structured-headers/
> 
>> * Is the parsing too strict, not strict enough, or just right?
> 
> AFAICT, the top-level parsing algorithm in Section 3 is missing a
> catch-all rule for trailing garbage. For example, right now, the
> following malformed Item header field will pass all checks and return a
> "valid" String to the caller. It should throw a "trailing garbage" error
> instead.
> 
>  Foo: "valid" garbage!
> 
> When fixing that, tolerating trailing BWS may be a good idea.

Good point, thanks.


>> Note that input_string may incorporate multiple header lines combined
>> into one comma-separated field-value
> 
> I understand the desire to limit this specification to parsing a single
> header field or equivalent, leaving the Pandora box of combining
> same-name fields closed. However, this honorable approach complicates
> placing interoperability limits on the number of list members: An
> application that parses individual fields (and possibly never combines
> the results!) may not hit the limit that an application combining raw
> value strings before parsing would hit.
> 
> IMHO, we should explicitly say something (conservative) about this
> problem so that header generators know how the limits may be applied.

If the document progresses this seems worth addressing.


>> However, field definitions are encouraged to clearly state additional
>> constraints upon the syntax, as well as the consequences when those
>> constraints are violated.
> 
> I would rephrase that phrase to avoid a misunderstanding: That phrase is
> talking about additional _semantic_ restrictions (on top of the frozen
> syntax rules), not additional syntax constraints.

Ack.

> Not sure whether this is in your "interesting things to discuss" scope,
> but please allow empty quoted strings :-).

Good point :)


> Thank you,
> 
> Alex.
> P.S. I am not reporting individual BNF and algorithm problems because
> they seem to be outside the "interesting things to discuss" scope.

Thanks for your forbearance; we'll get there :)


--
Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/

Received on Monday, 30 October 2017 22:47:57 UTC