From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Nov 13 1997 - 03:24:04 CST
In local.usenet Chris Newman <Chris.Newman@innosoft.com wrote:
>On Wed, 12 Nov 1997, Charles Lindsey wrote:
>> Why would you need two versions of the date/time specification? AFAICS
>> date-time is used in Date: and Resent-Date:. Unnecessary CFWS is
>> undesirable in both cases.
>The problem is that 822bis has a strong backwards compatibility
>requirement since we're updating a full standard specification. A client
>which sticks comments in the middle of the date header is conformant to
>RFC 822. Making a previously conformant client non-conformant requires
>good justification (e.g., significantly better interoperability with
>installed base and few such clients exist). Making a previously
>conformant client non-interoperable is simply not an option. Can you
>prove that no client exists which generates a comment in the date header
>anywhere other than at the end? If not, 822bis has to at least accept
>comments in those places.
Ah! I see. You would need to write an obs-date-time syntax in your chapter
4. I could live with that.
Note that for news, the requirement will be to support only the non-obs
syntax from mail (since existing news software tends not to accept most of
the obs stuff anyway). News implementations MAY accept it, of course, and
combined news/email systems such as Netscape probably will.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------- Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Voice/Fax: +44 161 437 4506 Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5