Harald,
At 6:22 PM 12/2/94, Harald(_dot_)T(_dot_)Alvestrand(_at_)uninett(_dot_)no wrote:
What I would suggest as replacement for the sentence he hates
would be the following:
While I applaud your desire to help resolve the current concern, I fear
that your suggestion does not achieve that end.
What we have now is a reasonably clear set of spec, for which there are
various 'regional' modifications. There is nothing wrong with such
modifications, except when they leak into the larger Internet. What your
suggested language does is to take the current restrictive specs and modify
them to say that there is no "right" behavior in the default case.
To the extent that anyone would find it helpful to add a sentence which
says something along the lines of "in some environments, the default has
been changed to use a different character set. Such changes place
additional burdens on the gateways to the global Internet, since they must
modify such messages to meet Internet standards. Unfortunately, this is
not always done, so that such messages sometimes escape into the Internet."
My point is that it's probably ok to cite the behavior, but let's not
change our specs to give people permission to do it globally.
d/
--------------------
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg Consulting Phone: +1 408 246 8253
675 Spruce Dr. Fax: +1 408 249 6205
Sunnyvale, CA 94086 Email:
dcrocker(_at_)mordor(_dot_)stanford(_dot_)edu