Re: [port-srv-reg] we need to make progress

[Stuart Cheshire <[e-mail]>]

On 3 Sep 2010, at 10:07, Joe Touch wrote:

>> It's certainly a lot less clear than the plain-English explanation. 
>> It's also wrong. I found at least one class of strings that it allows
>> that the plain-English rules do not, and it prohibits at least one
>> class of strings that the plain-English rules allow.
> 
> Can you be more specific and indicate what those each are?
> 
> I can see the error that it currently doesn't allow multiple hyphens in
> a row, but that's easily fixed:

Now I'm less tired I'm going to be more blunt about my opinion here.

I don't know who added the ABNF, and it doesn't really matter, but if anyone feels like I'm picking on them specifically then I apologise.

Sometimes ABNF is appropriate, but many times when I see ABNF in an IETF document it reminds me of the pretentious people who use latin in cocktail party conversations. They're not doing it because it's a clearer way to communicate, on the contrary, they're doing it precisely because they hope the listener will have to ask to have it explained, thereby making the speaker feel smug and intellectually superior. Of course that doesn't work when (a) the speaker gets the latin wrong, and (b) the listener does actually understand latin well enough to know that.

In this case the plain English text is easier to understand than the ABNF. I have asserted that the ABNF has a mistake in it, but I'm not going to say what. Perhaps I'm bluffing? The fact that no one is really sure whether I'm bluffing makes my point: that the ABNF is hard enough to understand that no one is really confident that they truly understand what it's saying. That makes it not very helpful text to have in the document.

Stuart Cheshire <[e-mail]>
* Wizard Without Portfolio, Apple Inc.
* www.stuartcheshire.org