From: Henry Spencer (henry@spsystems.net)
Date: Sun Jul 04 2004 - 14:33:54 CDT
On Sun, 4 Jul 2004, Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz wrote:
> >"Not compatible" *how*?
>
> By assigning it semantics and syntax inconsistent with RFC 2822.
Remember, "compatible" does not mean "identical" -- it means "the
differences don't cause trouble".
So what trouble, exactly, is caused by having news assign syntax and
semantics where 2822 just sees an unstructured blob? Bear in mind that
this is exactly what we do with all the news-specific headers. It's also
exactly what many mail-based applications, e.g. mailing-list packages, do.
It doesn't invalidate the major historical form of compatibility, i.e.
that any news article is a valid mail message.
It is one more reason why an arbitrary mail message might not be a valid
news article, but there are a bunch of those already. (For example, a
mail message doesn't actually have to have a message ID.)
How is it *incompatible*? Different, yes, but incompatible?
Henry Spencer
henry@spsystems.net