From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 29 2003 - 19:20:26 CDT
Dan Kohn <dan@dankohn.com> writes:
> In Section 3.2 of
> <http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-kohn-news-article-03.txt>, I
> suggest dealing with this in the following way:
> Following [RFC2822] syntax, the headers defined in this document do
> not require a space between the ":" and the field's contents. (E.g.,
> "Subject:Hello World" is acceptable, as opposed to requiring
> "Subject: Hello World".) To be compliant with this specification,
> news agents MUST support 0 or more spaces between the colon and the
> field's contents. However, to maximize compatibility with the
> installed base of news agents, implementers SHOULD use exactly one
> space.
> This would mean that INN was not compliant with this (new) spec, but the
> spec gives implementers advice on how deal successfully with such
> non-compliant software. This approach echoes the liberal/conservative
> principle (Section 3.2 of RFC 791) and would, over time, encourage
> convergence of news and mail software (to the degree it hasn't already
> happened).
Again, as an implementor of INN, I would look at this, realize that it
would take a month of work to become compliant in an area that none of my
users care about, that no one uses, and that is not backward-compatible
with RFC 1036, shrug, and decide that I wasn't interested in being
compliant with the specification.
Furthermore, given that there was already one area like this where it was
clearly not in my interests as an implementor to not comply with the
specification, I would be more willing to make that same decision in other
areas as well, thus making it more likely that my software would not
bother complying with the specification in various edge cases. After all,
I can't get the "compliant" label anyway for a reason that I personally
consider to be stupid, so my motivation to care about the standard has now
been noticably diminished.
In other words, decisions like this seriously hurt the adoption of
standards and reduce the amount of respect that they get. Provisions
which are widely ignored in the real world lead to standards which are
widely ignored in the real world.
If I'd ever actually seen a real-life mail message (not even a news
message) that didn't have a space after the colon, I might have a
different opinion, but I never have. This "feature" of the RFC 2822
protocol is about as widely used as source routing in RFC 822 was.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>