From: Henry Spencer (henry@spsystems.net)
Date: Tue May 07 2002 - 18:03:28 CDT
On 7 May 2002, Andrew Gierth wrote:
> In addition to those of the SHOULD/MUST items I posted that attempt to
> outlaw existing practice...
There is nothing wrong with a standard attempting to outlaw an existing
practice, when the existing practice is a really bad idea. Whether it can
*succeed* or not is another question, but encouraging people to refrain
from evil acts is praiseworthy even if evil acts are widespread.
> 1) folding and whitespace in the Path header ...
> 2) delimiters other than ! in the Path ...
> 3) Folding and whitespace in Newsgroups: ...
> 4) Folding in the Date header, other than at the end...
Although I haven't checked the latest draft, I believe there are cautions
in the discussion of all four of these about the state of support for
them, and the need to avoid them until support is more prevalent.
I preferred a less aggressive approach to these (marking them as future
directions, rather than making them standard but with cautions about
immediate use), but I don't feel strongly about the matter.
> 5) existing sites have restrictions on the total length of known
> headers, even when folded
This is perhaps unfortunate, but those sites are already subject to being
broken, since much existing posting/relaying software makes no attempt to
enforce such a limit.
> 6) Newsgroup names with components starting with _ or + are in use,
> contrary to the draft
So what? All sorts of odd practices are in use in various parts of the
net; that doesn't mean we have to endorse them all. This one is *not*
acceptable to all major servers, and hasn't been for a long time, so
blessing it would constitute exactly the sort of behavior you criticize in
your points 1-5, and for rather less reason.
Henry Spencer
henry@spsystems.net