Subject: RE: [Ltru] #944 in draft -04 (was: Confusing conformance language)

From: "Addison Phillips" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 14:48:09 -0700

Frank opined:
> 
> > I have rewritten Section 2.1.1 some more and those changes
> > went along for the ride. If you're interesting in issue #944,
> > you should go read that section again and send comments
> 
> Not new, but reading it again it still tickles me:  You say...
> 
> | a combined total length of up to six characters, much larger
> | registered tags were not only possible but were actually
> | registered.
> 
> ...if this "much longer" stands for "almost 67% longer" it's
> true, but OTOH ten characters is not _that_ long, if it's the
> worst registered 3066bis tag.
[Addison Phillips] 

The longest is "cel-gaulish" (11 characters), so 83% longer. But, of course, this is not "much" larger. It's only if Han Steenwijk had gone forward with his plans that we would have a whopping great tag to point to.
> 
> Here's a "normative" typo:

[Addison Phillips] 
<deleted a great deal of useful information>

> 
> Total length for the worst case from SP up to ?= therefore 22,
> 76-22=54.  For many Q-encoded US-ASCII characters it's only
> one byte resulting in an absolute _maximum_ of 76-15 = 61:
> 
>  =?utf-8*?Q?3?=
> 123456789012345 (15)
> 
> And for the worst Q-encoded case it is 76-26=50.

I agreed with all the deleted stuff and this example. A couple of points:

1. The Content-Language header has a limit of 60 (78-18).
2. The shortest charset alias I saw was two characters, so 76-12 = 64.
3. The longest charset permitted is 40, so it's 76-50 = 26, assuming ASCII characters, 76-52 = 24 (single-byte), or 76-55 = 21 (two-byte).
> 
> Now that's a nice number needing no explicit justification, you
> could say:                  vv
>   Thus the "limit" might be 50 or more characters, but it could
>   potentially be quite small

[Addison Phillips] 

Draft-5 will use this locution.

Thanks!

Addison

_______________________________________________
Ltru mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru

---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 06:20:40 +0200

Addison Phillips wrote:
 
> The longest is "cel-gaulish" (11 characters), so 83% longer.

Okay, 11 was the old record...

> But, of course, this is not "much" larger.

...yes, that's the point, "much longer" sounds like "we're not
changing anything important", and that's cowardly.

> 1. The Content-Language header has a limit of 60 (78-18).

RfC 3282, I forgot this one.  For mail the SHOULD-limit is 77,
78-1 for the folding, the MUST-limit is near 998 and irrelevant
for our problems.  For a comma separated language list 78-2=76.

For news it could be the same SHOULD-limit (still debated in
USEFOR, maybe we drop it and go for 998) with your formula:

Content-Language: en
....5...10....5... (18 up to SP, no folding in the first line)

> The shortest charset alias I saw was two characters

Yes, I looked only for the worst case, otherwise while I'm NO
"Unicadet" I somehow still consider utf-8 as "normal" (that's
one of the few cases where I disagree with my old "mozilla" ;-)

> The longest charset permitted is 40

Really ?  I only looked into the IANA registry, not in the RfC:

Extended_UNIX_Code_Fixed_Width_for_Japanese
....5...10....5...20....5...30....5...40....5
Extended_UNIX_Code_Packed_Format_for_Japanese

Okay, the latter has a decent EUC-JP preferred MIME alias, and
the former is a DBCS.
                       Bye, Frank