sounds like a good reason to declare the whole thing Experimental,
or maybe Historic...
Not to me. Just because people can screw it up does not mean that
most will. We have massive experience with people screwing up SMTP,
MIME, etc. The fact that we have plenty of good implementations means
that we shouldn't be moving things to Experimental or Historic; to do
so would just be reactionary.
This has the potential to cause a lot more harm than the typical
screwed-up SMTP.... particularly if a huge portion of the installed
base is polluted by the irresponsibility of a major vendor.
Basically I agree. This is why I didn't reject your (Keith's) call to move this
mechanism to experimental or historic out of hand.
However, the bottom line is that all we need to do is follow the process. When
the time comes to review this document with an eye to moving to draft (in, say,
6-8 months), there is still demonstrable evidence of widely used products
shipping that don't follow the standard, then it will be clear that this
protocol, for whatever reason, does not interoperate satisfactorily. And at
that time a move to historical, not experimental, will be appropriate.
And we will have learned something -- specifically, that the mechanism which if
memory serves Keith actually proposed, while technically adequate, isn't
practical from an implementation/deployment perspective.
I hope the folks at Microsoft who are responsible for this area of
non-compliance in their products are listening and understand what the
consequences of their continued non-compliance are likely to be.
Ned