Re: [Nmh-workers] nmh internals: full MIME integration

[Ken Hornstein]

>  | The ABNF has never allowed spaces between the header "tag" (for want of
>  | a word) and the ":" (going back to RFC 822).
>
>No, that's incorrect (or misleading anyway).   While if you just read 822's
>ABNF there are no spaces allowed, there aren't any anywhere else either.
>The ABNF needs to be read in conjunction with the text, which in 822 permitted
>white space (including comments) between any two tokens.     That includes
>the field name and the following ':', so in 822 it was perfectly legal to do...

Of course Robert is correct, but RFC 5322 makes this more explicit (see
§4.5 and the ABNF therein).  I did not really understand this until last
night, however :-)  RFC 5322 says that the obsolete syntax is a MUST to
interpret, which is unfortunate.  Although I suspect that if you sent out
an email today with spaces between the header and the colon, a number of
MUAs would choke.

--Ken