From: Ken Murchison (ken@oceana.com)
Date: Wed Mar 05 2003 - 13:09:50 CST
"J.B. Moreno" wrote:
>
> On 3/5/03 10:22 AM, Ken Murchison at <ken@oceana.com> wrote:
>
> > "J.B. Moreno" wrote:
>
> >>> RFC 1036 (the current standard) defers the matter to RFC 822,
> >>> which is quite clear that those 15% (or the authors of software
> >>> used by them) have alienated themselves.
> >>
> >> See, that's what I don't like -- the absolute contempt in the above
> >> statement: they haven't "alienated themselves", they found themselves being
> >> inadequatly served by the existing standard and had to go beyond it to get
> >> things done.
> >
> > Bullshit. They _have_ alienated themselves. If they had a problem with
> > the standard not serving their needs, they should have ammended/improved
> > the standard first, not just make shit up and try to make everybody else
> > comply later (sounds like a big company in Redmond, WA).
>
> So kids in Brazil and housewives in Korea should have worked on rewriting a
> standard instead of getting on with the gossip?
>
> Or does the fact that they are non-technical users mean they are irrelevant?
>
> There are very few people actually interested in writing standards, no
> matter how much they think something is needed.
Sorry, I was unclear. The user's aren't the problem, the authors of the
software are the problem. The software shouldn't be sending out the
untagged data, it should be encoded according to the standards. If the
authors of the packages being used chose not to do so, then shame on
them. If they did this because there was no viable alternative, then
they should have been part of a solution, not part of making the problem
bigger.
If any new standard causes things to break for non-compliant messages,
then either the authors will fix their software, or the users will vote
with their feet and select a different package. Is this harsh?
Absolutely, if it comes to that.
I don't see why should the rest of the messaging community should have
to potentially rewrite software for a problem that is currently
localized in a small part of Usenet. If anybody should have to rewrite
software to correct this problem, it should be the authors of the broken
software. I get the impression from these threads that the usenet
people want to do what's easiest for them, and then throw the shit over
the fence for everybody else to deal with.
I think that it has been conceded by just about everyone that making
everything 8-bit clean is the most elegant solution, but it isn't
_necessary_. But as I always tell my wife and kids, there is a BIG
difference between wanting something and needing something.
-- Kenneth Murchison Oceana Matrix Ltd. Software Engineer 21 Princeton Place 716-662-8973 x26 Orchard Park, NY 14127 --PGP Public Key-- http://www.oceana.com/~ken/ksm.pgp