Re: Annotate

[Philip Guenther <guenther@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dave Cridland <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>On Sat Nov  6 12:55:43 2004, Alexey Melnikov wrote:
>> Timo Sirainen wrote:
...
>>> Servers MUST(?) support new namespaces created by clients.
>> 
>> I think this should be "SHOULD". We want to encourage ANNOTATE 
>> servers. Implementing a read-only ANNOTATE is much easier.
>> 
>> 
>Yes, but the need for clients to store vendor-private stuff in a 
>nice, neat, semi-interoperable manner really shouldn't be 
>underestimated. Dropping this to a SHOULD is perhaps too far.

As described in RFC 2119, "SHOULD" is a fairly strong statement, with
"MUST" being for the do-or-die stuff only.  A quick scan of the IMAP RFC
finds a goodly number of uses of "SHOULD" that a server or client would
be very unwise to blithely disregard.


>I'd personally suggest that if the server supports read-write 
>annotations, it MUST support creation of arbitrary, non-operational 
>attributes.

Is a server that only supports preconfigured namespaces an active danger
to interoperability?  If not, then I think "MUST" is inappropriate.


Philip Guenther