From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Apr 30 2003 - 06:20:06 CDT
In <Pine.BSI.3.91.1030429163705.14087A-100000@spsystems.net> Henry Spencer <henry@spsystems.net> writes:
>On Tue, 29 Apr 2003, Bruce Lilly wrote:
>> ...Let's not perpetuate a difference from 822/2822
>> unless there's a very good reason to do so.
>Preserving interoperability with a large installed base is usually
>considered a very good reason.
>(And no, interoperability with the installed base of mail systems is not
>a significant issue by comparison: news-mail interchange has always
>required non-trivial efforts by gateways, and there is no prospect of
>eliminating that.)
There seems to be a fundamental difference of philosophy here.
The Email school seems to delight in allowing all sorts of syntactic
constructs which nobody ever uses, which serve no useful purpose and
provide no additional functionality, but which cost implementation effort
and, in some cases, serious runtime overhead to accomodate.
The News school takes the view that syntax should be restricted to allow
as little variation as possible, so that implementation is simplified
(bear in mind that Usenet was invented and implemented by hackers who gave
away their products for free - a situation which largely remains to this
day).
Of course, I exaggerate the distinction, but it is nevertheless real. The
principal examples are that SP after the ':', and the msg-id (the full
stupidities of which are now being incorporated into
draft-ietf-imapext-sort-11.txt).
RFC 2822 has recognized this by relegating many such features to its
obsolete syntax. But it did not go far enough, and it ought to be revised
to go further. For too long, the email people have claimed the right to
fix the standards. It is high time Netnews got a look in.
-- 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@clerew.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