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Re: [Json] [Editorial Errata Reported] RFC8259 (7383)

Carsten Bormann <cabo@tzi.org> Sun, 12 March 2023 20:39 UTC

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From: Carsten Bormann <cabo@tzi.org>
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Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2023 21:39:18 +0100
Cc: Rob Sayre <sayrer@gmail.com>, RFC Errata System <rfc-editor@rfc-editor.org>, 00mk01@gmail.com, json@ietf.org
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To: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
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Subject: Re: [Json] [Editorial Errata Reported] RFC8259 (7383)
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On 2023-03-12, at 19:07, Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com> wrote:
> 
> Heh, this goes back to RFC4627, dated July 2006.

Much of ABNF was designed in 1977, when many computing environments only were starting to embrace lower-case (as usual, the future was already there, just not evenly distributed).
In keeping with what was the normal way to cope at the time, ABNF literals are case-insensitive.

When case-insensitive finally went out of fashion(*), misunderstandings started to multiply, in both directions.

By now, we tend to have little refreshers about this in our documents, e.g. [1].
(We forgot to put in another one for HEXDIG [2], but maybe that’s not needed.)

Grüße, Carsten

(*)  (I’d say around 1999, but zombies have been observed as late as 2005 [0].)

[0]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-case-for-case-insensitivity/
[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-jsonpath-base-11#section-2.5.5.1-11
[2]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-jsonpath-base-11#section-2.5.1.1-3

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