> > As I've said before to others, people can purposely
> > misread any specification we right, so I'm not inclined to try to
> > complicate things to try plug some perceived hole unless it's
> > actually going to stop someone who really wants to do the right thing
> > from doing something silly.
> I don't pretend to know whether or not any given person wants to do
> the right thing. I do know that a significant number of systems
> are doing something quite silly, and I suspect that that silliness
> is due in large measure to ambiguities in 2822 and/or conflicts
> with other relevant specifications, and I further suspect that the
> amount of such silliness will increase in the absence of
> clarification.
I'm sorry, but absent a bunch of specific examples I'm going to have to
disagree with you on this. I run into incompliant behavior of this and many
other sorts all the time. In most cases it isn't possible to communicate with
the responsible parties so there's no way to know why they did it. But when it
is and they open their mouths to respond what usually emerges is a loud sucking
sound resulting from the total vacuum of salient information between their
ears.
It is nothing short of stunning how many people think they know how to
implement a protocol (the specific protocol is irrelevant) just from a cursory
examination of example protocol exchanges from some random book they flipped
through one day at a local bookstore. And no amount of added prose, or more
precise ABNF, or anything else we do is going to change this. In fact by making
our specifications longer we if anything make the problem slightly worse, not
better.
There are problems that we simply cannot solve and I'm very much afraid this is
one of them.
Ned
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