Re: OT: Re: Less is more

Arnt Gulbrandsen <[email protected]> Fri, 30 Apr 2004 23:11:11 +0200
Newsgroups gmane.mail.ng
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Keith Moore writes:
> If that field occurred in an actual message generated by an actual MUA 
> I'd claim it was a programmer error even if it was syntactically 
> valid :)  Anyone who put that in a shipping product ought to be 
> sacked.

I can agree with that - but then I'm not arguing that the RFC822 date 
format is sensible and good.

>> If a program can't parse Frode's field, it can't parse the RFC822 
>> date field syntax as specified.
>
> True, but it could quite possibly parse 99.999% of the dates that 
> occur in actual use, including dates that aren't valid - at which 
> point the inability to parse dates is insignificant in comparison to 
> failures that are due to other problems. If you're concerned about 
> reliability
[ ... ]

I'm concerned with interoperability. I'm concerned that the mail-ng 
specification will be simple and sensible, so people parse and generate 
the syntax as specified, not some undefined smallish subset of it.

Arnt