Maciek Niedzielski typeth: | As far as I know, % was used in the same way in very old times, in SMTP, | in cases when it was impossible to send email directly to | [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Don't ask me why why it was impossible, I don't | know the story well - maybe it was internal domain, or maybe not | compatible server, I don't know)
It comes from the days when mailers weren't always reachable by a connect() to a certain host and port. For instance if you had to reach a person on BITNET you would use [EMAIL PROTECTED] where gateway was a machine capable to route both SMTP and bitnet email. Also on UUCP there were hub nodes which were generally known, and everyone knew how to route to them, but the leaves off the tree weren't, especially if they were private machines standing in homes. So you would do something like [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yes at a certain point they started appending top level domains so that the addresses, even if delivered by dialup UUCP, were valid addresses on internet aswell. I guess it took until the advent of DSL to replace most UUCP on earth by TCP/IP. In developing countries UUCP is still often essential, so you can't say that syntax is obsolete. On the technical issue of [EMAIL PROTECTED] i must say I really dislike how Jabber cannot deal with a clean transparent notation like msn:[EMAIL PROTECTED] These kludgy jid-deformations are both ugly and hard to understand for the end user. Why should she put the hostname into the user field and a fake hostname into the hostname field, when adding an MSN buddy to her roster? Also icq:12345 would be much nicer than the kludge that transports provide. Additionally, you leave it to the server to route to the transport. Why should you have a lot of new friendships just because you switched to a different transport (= the one you had broke down or you no longer trust his privacy promises). I strongly support the idea of abandoning the [EMAIL PROTECTED] requirement for jids and let jids be opaque strings to be interpreted by the receiving entity. -- --» Carlo v. Loesch --» http://symlynX.com » psyc://psyced.org/~lynX xmpp:[EMAIL PROTECTED] » irc://psyced.org/#symlynX the CryptoChat » https://psyced.org/LynX/?room=symlynX
