Re: host-meta file format comments (draft-nottingham-site-meta-01)

(diverting to www-talk, too...)

On 11 Feb 2009, at 01:20, Mark Nottingham wrote:

> Yeah, I'm not completely happy with it yet. The thought was that  
> since blank lines don't introduce ambiguity here, they're not  
> harmful. OTOH one of my goals for the format is to allow existing  
> HTTP header and MIME parsers (e.g., in Python) to be used on the  
> format, and they very well may barf on a blank line.

Well, they'll barf on blank lines and declare the header over;  
changing that within the parser (or just restarting it on the rest of  
the file) should be relatively cheap.

BTW, I notice that this draft is silent on the HTTP header syntax's  
combining feature for multiple occurences of the same field (last  
paragraph of 4.2, RFC 2616); I suspect that to be one of the more  
likely causes for surprises if HTTP header parsers are re-used.  (No  
such risk with MIME parsers.)

Finally, why disallow whitespace stuffed folding?  It's pretty useful  
to make long lines editable, and I suspect that we're assuming /host- 
meta to be the product of some human with emacs in their hands.    
Implementing it is easy, and a given if existing parsers are used.

> So, the right thing to do might be to explicitly disallow them, both  
> in BNF and prose. Eran, thoughts?

I'd just prefer to not have the BNF say "no empty lines", and then  
have prose that says the opposite, but with a SHOULD.