From: Henry Spencer (henry@spsystems.net)
Date: Fri Dec 13 2002 - 11:45:25 CST
On Fri, 13 Dec 2002, John Stanley wrote:
> >Backward compatibility is an entirely sufficient reason, given that there
> >is no benefit from making it case-insensitive.
>
> I guess not rejecting articles where an agent has treated the value as
> case-insensitive isn't a benefit, huh?
No, it's not. Why would an agent do that? Accomodating mistakes made by
broken software is seldom of real benefit to anyone. There is no limit to
the stupidities we will be asked to accommodate if we adopt a policy of
loosening the standard to tolerate likely mistakes.
There is no benefit in accepting articles where a misbehaving agent has
generated/tolerated misspelling "poster" as "psoter", "postur", or "Poster".
> >My case here is based on the value of backward compatibility, and the
> >supposition that USEFOR is a standards-track document (documenting
> >existing behavior).
>
> Yes, that's right. Existing behaviour is apparently that this value is
> case-insensitive for the users. Otherwise there would have been no report
> that the value "Poster" was being rejected.
No, this is a new report, of a new mistake. Were it widespread, yes, it
would constitute existing practice. But the mere fact that someone
recently made a mistake does not demand that we bless it as existing
practice. The fact that there has been *one* such report, and quite
recently too, indicates that it is not common.
Since the very earliest days of Usenet, people have been known to misspell
newsgroup names. Does that mean that we must accept spelling errors as
existing practice, and insist that every serving agent do automatic
spelling correction of group names? Surely not.
> >Why? The fact that users may be entering the wrong thing by hand ...
>
> Why should it be the wrong thing?
Because much existing software does not accept it, no prior document has
blessed it (1036 is silent about case except in addresses, son-of-1036
explicitly says "case-sensitive unless stated otherwise"), there is no new
functionality or improved mail compatibility to be had by permitting it,
and it would be a new special case requiring special handling (nothing
else that can appear in Followup-To is case-insensitive).
Henry Spencer
henry@spsystems.net