Re: OT: Re: Less is more

[Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> I get the feeling with many mail implementations that 
> the implementors failed to appreciate that RFC822 was actually meant to be a 
> strict grammar at all.

That, and the "if it works for me, it must be okay" philosophy.  e.g. the 
programmer codes up a program that generates dates in yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss
format, uses it to send a message to himself, and because his user agent
isn't set up to sort on the Date field he never notices that the dates
his program is generating aren't usable.

> Perhaps the human-readability of it lends the 
> impression that it's *only* meant to be human readable. Or maybe something 
> closer to your explanation is also true in some cases: the grammar is 
> sufficiently daunting that implementors just aim for an approximation, 
> coupled with some basic compatibility tests.

Note that 2822 is arguably worse than 822 in this respect.  2822 tried
to be more precise in defining what a reader should accept, and as a 
result it made it harder to understand what a sender should generate.

> It's not clear to me what it would take to make implementors follow the 
> standard as written, and it's more of a psychology problem than a computer 
> science problem. My best current guess as to how to deal with the problem is 
> to assume that implementors are lazy, and make a point of giving them 
> something easy to implement. 

That, and write the specifications in such a way as to leave as little doubt
as possible about how to do it.  Maybe even give them code.

> "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to 
> add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
> -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-44)

one of my favorites.
-- 
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Regime change 2004 - better late than never.