From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Tue Aug 03 2004 - 11:09:14 CDT
Shmuel (Seymour J ) Metz <Shmuel+gen@patriot.net> writes:
> No, the problem does not remain identical, because putting that language
> in serves as a notice to correctly recognize the presence of MIME
> parameters and ignore them, as opposed to interpreting them as something
> other than MIME parameters.
This doesn't actually work. If there is no deployed use of a feature that
requires a parser change, the parser change by and large does not happen,
regardless of what a standard says. Too much software is written based on
what people actually see in practice than on standards, particularly for
Usenet where there are few workable standards right now.
About the only thing that putting something like this into the current
document would do is make people feel better about breaking existing
software in the future because of a fuzzy "they were warned" concept. At
least in my experience, it wouldn't actually significantly reduce the
amount of software that would break or make it significantly easier in
practice to deploy such a change.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>