From: J. B. Moreno (planb@newsreaders.com)
Date: Mon Mar 01 2004 - 14:02:21 CST
On 2/27/04 1:25 AM, Russ Allbery at <rra@stanford.edu> wrote:
> Some divergences, like requiring Subject, we may have to live with in the
> long term, but I think we can and should minimize those. If we cannot
> reach the point where we can write a clear, concise, and *short* document
> that describes everything format-wise one has to worry about when
> converting from e-mail to news and back again, I believe we will have
> failed to adopt a reasonable article format.
While I believe that if our description of the format is such that someone
can write 100% compliant software that is nevertheless unusable because
necessary details have been left out, we will have failed to do our job.
I consider having the article format say that the what is in the Subject is
totally irrelevant and the client can do whatever it likes to it because
it's unstructured to be just the sort of thing to likely cause problems --
because I see it causing problems everyday. Small, annoying problems to be
sure -- but that's because few clients actually screw it up. If we dismiss
or even worse embrass them screwing it up, that might change.
If you want a document that describest converting from email to news and
back again, I suggest that *that* should be a separate document -- in fact I
think that's a damn good idea, something that describes the differences and
difficulties would be immensely helpful to someone doing that.
Trying to make them exactly the same isn't the solution to the problem of
gateway documentation.