> I can't see how this hurts the product, and the RFC has already been > destroyed many times over by real-world implementations. So relatively, > I see any damage we're doing to the RFC at this point as inconsequential. :)
This hurts the RFC because it helps the proliferation of non-RFC-compliant clients. As it was explained before in the thread a lot of programmers out there don't read RFCs and just "try it". When it works they declare their work valid, even if the client they wrote is in violation of the RFC. The RFC being destroyed many times should actually make us more carefull to any further damage and not the opposite like you're suggesting. Otherwise it would mean that we consider the RFC as irrelevant!! > At this point I'd weigh the behavior of sendmail, qmail, exchange, and a > few others more highly than what the RFC states. This is valid in that we have to ask ourself the question: * Do we want a strictly RFC-compliant James (would help the RFC but would break with poorly compliant clients) * Do we want a loosely RFC-Compliant James (would work with more clients but could generate under the hood problems and help proliferation of non RFC compliant clients) Of course the answer to that question is: both. And the real question is what kind of tradeoff we want for this or that feature. I think bad clients should be fixed, and it's definitely not the server task to be lenient. Lots of RFCs were broken like that. To take a simple example, let's see what happened to the HTML RFC. IE would recognize tags that are not RFC compliant and so web pages would proliferate with these invalid tag, breaking more and more pages for other browsers. I don't think that the good solution would be for all browsers to support all the HTML extensions that IE does, as every web browser would become bloated with under-the-hood hidden undocumented features that nobody cares about. They're bloated enough like that ;-) My .02 --pierre --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
