On Tue, 18 Aug 1998, Ned Freed <Ned(_dot_)Freed(_at_)innosoft(_dot_)com> writes
Ah, the old "if we legalize it everyone will start abusing it" argument. I'm
sorry, but I don't buy this line of reasoning in the "war on drugs" and
I don't buy it here.
No, I was worried that the very _use_ (not abuse) of these proposals
could cause problems with deployed MUAs.
Again, I don't especially care what we do as long as we do something and do it
soon.
It would be worse to do something quickly that broke the installed base
than do nothing at all.
But what we do needs to be selected not on the basis of "this could be
abused hence it is bad" sorts of arguments, but instead on the basis of "this
is more likely to be seen as solving a problem for MUA writers and hence is
more likely to be deployed". Any of these schemes can and will be abused.
Agreed.
I can accept an argument along the lines of "this is too complex and either
won't get implemented or won't get implemented correctly". And I definitely
think that what you originally proposed is far too complex. Randy's scheme is
much simpler, but I remain to be convinced it is simple enough. And for that
matter, I can also accept an argument that "we're unlikely to reach consensus
on one of these trailing space thingies any time soon so we'd best go with a
simpler labelling scheme we can reach consensus on".
If format=flowed used text/enriched-like line conventions (one CRLF =>
soft eol, n CRLFs => n-1 hard eols) rather than trailing spaces, would
a consensus be reached? (I have already suggested this to Randy.)
--
Ian Bell T U R N P I K E Ltd