Re: [Pan-users] Re: Trouble with Pan and news.grc.com

[Per Hedeland]

Joe Zeff <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>On 01/03/2009 Beartooth wrote:
>>     I forgot to mention the corroboration! I took that mizzawobble 
>> fershlugginer little space out, and presto change-o : the message 
>> cross-
>> posted.
>
>This should be reported as a bug.  A properly written parser ignores 
>whitespace.

Debatable, if not simply wrong. For some reason, the original Usenet
article format specs (RFC 850 and later 1036) defined a syntax that was
a "restricted" version of the e-mail spec in RFC 822, to the point where
it could be handled by a 7-year-old playing around with BASIC, who had
never heard the word "parser" and wouldn't understand it if he did. RFC
1036 clearly states "Multiple newsgroups may be specified, separated by
a comma." (And there is nothing in there that prevents newsgroups from
having spaces in their names.)

One reason for the "restricted" format could be that RFC 822 defines a
syntax that in some cases is complex enough that a correctly working
parser probably never has been written... (Of course there isn't a
Newsgroups: header in RFC 822, but plenty of other comma-separated
things where whitespace and line-folding is allowed in strange and
unexpected places.)

The USEFOR draft does away with this particular restriction (and
probably others):

   newsgroup-list  =  *WSP newsgroup-name
                      *( [FWS] "," [FWS] newsgroup-name ) *WSP

- however it seems the USEFOR group didn't manage to produce an RFC in
its ~ 10 years of "working", and the final draft is expired since 18
months, leaving 1036 as the closest thing to a standard there is.

--Per