Subject: Edits for draft-ietf-drums-abnf-v2-00.txt

From: Dan Kohn <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1998 23:47:26 -0700

Dave, here are some minor edits to the v2 ABNF
<ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-drums-abnf-v2-00.txt>:

+ The Introduction needs to say that this document replaces RFC 2234,
and then add the reference at the bottom.

+ I would also suggest replacing "RFC733" and "RFC822" with "RFC 733"
and "RFC 822", or even better, with "[RFC 733]" and "[RFC 822]" to
indicate that they are in the references.

+ Would it be possible for me to convince you to remove capitalizations
in the section headers and table of contents?  Besides the fact that
mixed case is standard, many people (including myself), find it
impossible to read all-caps text (other than basic-rules, of course) and
just skip over it.  I would even recommend changing "NOTE:" to "Note:".

+ You have an extra 2CRLF before each top-level section header.

+ In 2.3, the phrase that begins "To specify a rule which IS case
SENSITIVE..." should either be left-justified or be a "Note:".

+ At the very end of 2.3, you should put the "abc" in quotes to be
consistent with your usage elsewhere.

+ In 2.4, you say: "By separating external encoding from the syntax, it
is intended that alternate encoding environments can be used for the
same syntax."  The first example seems to potentially contradict this,
by specifying a US-ASCII value:

                  foo = %x61             ; a

Would it make sense to add a sentence saying: "Examples in the text
below use the US-ASCII environment as specified in Appendix A."?

+ In 3.4, I believe the discussion of mixing concatenated numeric values
and numeric value ranges needs to be moved to the appendix, section 7.1.

+ In 3.9, would it make sense to add a sentence saying, "When a rule
includes a multi-line comment, it is common to include an extra space
between the semicolon and comment on the second and subsequent lines."?

+ In the definition of "bin-value" in Section 4 and 7.2, does "ONEOF
range" have an obvious meaning I'm not aware of?  It appears to be the
only word in all caps that's not a rule.

+ In the definition of "prose-value" in Section 4, you are missing
semicolons on the 2nd and 4th comment lines, apparently because of
unexpected line wraps.

+ In the definition of "char-value" in Section 4, the second comment
line is missing a semicolon.

+ In the definition of "CHAR" in Section 6.1, the second comment line is
missing a semicolon.

+ It seems like a new section above the acknowledgements would be
warranted describing changes from RFC 2234 (e.g., creation of section 7
and minor edits).

+ In section 8, change "RFC #733" to "RFC 733".

		- dan

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Daniel Kohn <[email-masked]>
Teledesic LLC
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