Subject: [apps-discuss] Draft Review Request of draft-yevstifeyev-abnf-separated-lists-00

From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2010 10:01:44 -0500

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 4:23 AM, Mykyta Yevstifeyev <[email-masked]> wrote:
> I am writing to reuqest the review of my draft folowing the advice of
> Russ Housley
...
> You are able to find it here:
>
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-yevstifeyev-abnf-separated-lists/?include_text=1

It's short; I'll give it a review for form here.  I'll leave it to
Dave to discuss why such list constructs aren't in 5234.

Starting with a nit: How did you create this draft?  The abstract is
in the "wrong" place (I initially thought it was missing), so it seems
you're not using the latest tools.

The abstract is too brief.  How about this?:

OLD
   This document specifies Augmented Backus-Naur Form (ABNF) notation
   for separated lists. It updates RFC 5234.

NEW
   This document defines Augmented Backus-Naur Form (ABNF) notation
   for representing lists separated by any specified character. It
updates RFC 5234.

Introduction:
   ABNF provides a possibility to express lists of elements, separated
   by commas (",") via the construction <a>#<b>element.

Where is that documented?  It's not in RFC 5234.

Section 2:
The ABNF isn't right.  You don't show that <n> and <m> are optional,
and you define them as having at least one digit each... and then you
say that either or both can be omitted in some cases.

Also, "<m-n>" as an arithmetic difference isn't meaningful in ABNF.
Perhaps the text that's there is sufficient to make it clear, but I
think it won't pass automated processing.  I'm not sure what the best
way to handle that is.

A section with a few examples would be helpful.

Barry