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Graham Klyne <GK-lists(_at_)ninebynine(_dot_)org> writes:
At 12:52 PM 10/3/01 -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
What I'd like this document to do is to discourage pollution of the
message header by unscrupulous vendors trying to degrade interoperability
with their competitors' products.
It would be nice if there were a standards-track document that clearly
said: header "FOO" is bogus and you should neither generate it nor use it.
I think absence from the registry should suffice for that.
But OTOH we are faced with a current situation where people gaily invent
news headers regardless of any RFC. Sometimes these headers prosper and
eventually find their way into RFCs. A good example is the Mail-Copies-To
header in Netnews. It is now widely supported and even honoured, and so we
have decided to include it in Usefor. But if we had been designing that
feature from scratch, we would certainly have given it a more suitable
name.
If we make it too hard to get a header onto the registry, then people are
going to ignore us, just as they do now. If we make it too easy we are
going to get lots of badly-named headers, just as we do now. The trick
will be to devise a mechanism that strikes a balance between these two
extremes.
--
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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