From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Jul 04 2001 - 05:56:24 CDT
In <yl3d8dkgwg.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
>Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
>> But generally speaking mail readers have a bad reputation when used as
>> news readers,
>See, I don't understand where you're coming from when you say things like
>this. *confused look* Do we just have very different Usenet experiences
>or something?
Well actually, most of the systems that are accused of being bad
newsreaders are probably bad mailers as well. Certain widely criticised
products from Microsoft spring to mind.
>I understand your point of view; I just really strongly disagree with it.
>I think it makes things more complex for implementors without any real
>gain, and it unnecessarily limits Usenet (particularly in the area of
>gatewaying, which is a personal interest of mine, but also in the area of
>other MIME types that people are going to add without worrying about
>Usenet's ideosyncratic and unnecessary restrictions).
Yes, we are clearly in disagreement. Perhaps we two should stand aside and
listen to what others have to say. There was certainly VERY strong
pressure in the early days of this list to push everything hard in the
8bit direction. People who still think that way need to speak up.
>Except where our restrictions break things we don't even know about, like
>multipart/signed. I'm quite certain that's not going to be the only case
>like that, and I'm also quite certain that we won't find them all before
>we publish, if we ever publish.
Well we covered multipart/signed. But the wording as I have it essentially
says that you need not use 8bit if that causes some protocol to break, or
you cannot reasonably determine that is not so. It carefully describes
the specific cases we mention as "examples".
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk 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