Subject: Re: RFC-2445: ABNF/prose mismatch on parameters

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 12:23:37 -0400

John asked:
>Frank's recollection is that this ordering was accidental, a
>side effect of the easiest way to write the ABNF.  The sense of the WG
>meeting is that, when we go to Draft Standard, we should probably change
>the ABNF to agree with the prose, opening up the spec so that parameters
>can be in any order.

I seem to agree w/Franks recollection.  I like the idea of making the ABNF 
match the prose (since some folks only live by ABNFs) but if it will make 
reading/editing the draft much, much more tedious then Id say we put a 
comment in the ABNF to clarify the issue rather than bloat the draft by 
double or tripple digit expansion just for a 100% flexible ABNF.

Do we have a resident ABNF guru that can offload this task for the 
editors??  If not, then we either need to get one from elsewhere in the 
IETF or we add comentary to the ABNF to avoid too much bloating of the 
draft.  (I for one would prefer to focus on the technical challenges ahead 
rather than wading thru a full page ANBF on, say, ATTENDEE.)

Bruce
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Bruce Kahn                                INet: [email-masked]
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From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1999 00:13:15 +0200

[email-masked] wrote:

> I seem to agree w/Franks recollection.  I like the idea of making the
> ABNF match the prose (since some folks only live by ABNFs) but if it
> will make reading/editing the draft much, much more tedious then Id
> say we put a comment in the ABNF to clarify the issue rather than
> bloat the draft by double or tripple digit expansion just for a 100%
> flexible ABNF.

Mmm, how hard it is depends on what we want to do.  The easiest way
would probably be for the ABNF not to say anything about
mandatory/optional-single/optional-multiple, and just say "zero or more
parameters"; then the prose would specify the multiplicities of
individual parameters.  (Of course, this is the same opinion I have
about XML DTDs: don't validate; check it in the code.  :-)

On the other hand, ABNF might be able to specify things like "OK, here's
the expansion rule for zero-or-more params; here's a constraint, 'must
not have more than one Foo param'; here's another constraint, 'must have
at least one Bar param'".  I could do it with regexpen, but I don't know
about ABNF.

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