On approximately 10/9/2009 4:20 PM, came the following characters from
the keyboard of R. David Murray:
On Fri, 9 Oct 2009 at 13:26, Glenn Linderman wrote:
On approximately 10/9/2009 8:10 AM, came the following characters
from the keyboard of Stephen J. Turnbull:
Glenn Linderman writes:
> > > produce a defect report, but then simply converted to Unicode
as if > > > it were Latin-1 (since there is no other knowledge
available that > > > could produce a better conversion).
> > > > No, that is already corruption. Most clients will assume
that string
> > is valid as a header, because it's valid as a string.
> > Sure it is corruption. That's why there is a defect report. But
> the conversion technique is appropriate, per the Postel principle.
Actually, I would say you are emitting leniently, in violation of the
Postel principle.
You can say that, but I don't have to believe it. I'm talking about
accepting; the message has arrived, it is here, the client is trying
to look at it, and I'm talking about ways the client can look at
not-quite-perfect data, knowing that it is not quite perfect, but
still being able to see it. I'm not at all talking about emitting
data. You seem to be calling the email package helping the client to
accept not-quite-perfect data, as a form of emitting data. It is not.
IMO, the appropriate way for the email package to provide the API you
are talking about is it provide the client with a way to get at the raw
byte string, which I think everyone agrees on. If the client wants to
decode it as if it were latin-1 to process it, it can then do that.
That certainly works, but it isn't very helpful... that forces the
client application to reproduce the logic to parse the header value and
decode the parts that can be decoded successfully, and that is exactly
the sort of thing Stephen was complaining about when he thought I was
suggesting that to be a requirement (but he was confused about what I
was suggesting).
--
Glenn -- http://nevcal.com/
===========================
A protocol is complete when there is nothing left to remove.
-- Stuart Cheshire, Apple Computer, regarding Zero Configuration Networking
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