From: Brad Templeton (brad@clari.net)
Date: Tue Nov 04 1997 - 16:57:59 CST
On Tue, Nov 04, 1997 at 11:06:00PM +0200, Kai Henningsen wrote:
> brad@clari.net (Brad Templeton) wrote on 02.11.97 in <19971102114306.31142@polka.clari.net>:
> That's not do nothing. It's documenting the convention where people can
> find it.
>
> And as the convention doesn't work with a huge number of articles today,
> and there is no reason to believe that forbidding anything will
> significantly change that, I don't think we do anybody a favour by
> forbidding anything.
It is do nothing. It was already written down in Henry's document, but
not in a really formal way.
The role of this document is to really write it down. To say, "If you
want a personal signature, this is how you do it. You don't do it any
other way."
Then, once enough software is conformant to this spec, other software
can start relying on the rule, and we have the power to say to people posting
non-conformant articles, "your software is out of date."
If we don't specify it here, we can't do that, and the problem is never
fixed. If we specify it here, it does get fixed some day.