From: J.B.Moreno (planb@newsreaders.com)
Date: Wed Mar 03 2004 - 18:56:37 CST
On 3/3/04 3:57 PM, Russ Allbery at <rra@stanford.edu> wrote:
> Fallacy of the excluded middle. Not requiring it isn't the same thing as
> not giving authors any advice. Both of those responses addressed the
> claim that putting anything else in there is "broken", which is a
> considerably stronger statement than "not a good idea."
An article is either compliant or non-compliant, it either contains
forbidden elements or it doesn't, it either contains all of the required
elements or it doesn't.
If I write a newsreader according to the standard as they want it written,
and when posting it inserts "Send $5 to planb@newsreaders.com via paypal to
earn millions: " before the user's subject, how is that not a compliant
article according to what they are saying?
What is it doing that the standard forbids it to do, or conversely what is
it NOT doing that the standard requires it to do?
Now, their grounds for wanting the standard written so as to make the above
compliant is that the user can hand enter the above, and so we can't forbid
the software from doing it -- because it's impossible to tell the difference
between what the software did and what the human did, and we can't control
the human.
This is bogus on three grounds -- one, I can put anything I like into any
header that I like without even resorting to telnet where everything that
goes out is what I typed in, which means that all followup requirements are
out the window (including References) if the user's ability to override is
to be considered relevant. Two, we can't control what software does any
better than we can control what humans do: if they do something that the
standard forbids then they have done something the standard forbids, it's
either stopped or it's not, that doesn't change the fact that it was
non-compliant. If I write a newsreader and it reuses message-id's after 6
months, then it's non-compliant, but the article will still possibly get
around; if my client doesn't include a References the articles it produces
won't be dropped; a server that adds a random peer to a path header won't
prevent the article from propogating to other servers it peers with. Having
an error detected and the article dropped is *not* the definition of
"broken" or "non-compliant". Three, although we can't tell the difference
from the other end, we still address our statements to various software
elements (server, relayer, injection agent and so forth), we can just as
easily direct our statements at "humans" as we can at relayers (and in fact
they are more likely to be aware of our requirements than older software).
So, the fact that it is not possible to run just the headers and body of an
article through a program and have it spit out "non-compliant" or
"compliant", doesn't mean we should be silent on the issue.
-- J.B. Moreno