> And it will continue to regress until one knowledgeable and independent > human being serves as final arbiter of standards.
i think some of it eventually will be formalised, much as we do with programming languages (even Javascript, which i mentioned, at least has a plausible grammar), but it seems we still haven't got a suitable tool to do it (or at least, not one that enough people use without fuss). even then a formalised version of something can still have (more formal) bugs, that fail to express an intention correctly. anyway, just to be helpful: Bakul is right that as in Erik's case, for networked applications particularly, you end up having to be pragmatic when talking to other implementations. for example, the (old) Mac POP3 client demanded a space at a certain point, even when there was no argument (required by the POP3 RFC). most other server implementations included something chatty there, and the POP3 client implementation had followed the servers, not the RFC.
