ietf-822
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Re: Fwd: I-D ACTION:draft-klyne-msghdr-registry-02.txt

2002-01-31 16:04:06

On 1/31/02 at 5:54 PM -0500, Keith Moore wrote:

It certainly is an indication that the field is not standardized, that it doesn't have a specification that has received community review and consensus before use.

It certainly indicates that there is no spec, but it doesn't at all mean that the field is not a de-facto standard. In fact, it may have received a sufficient level of community review (e.g., X-Mailer and X-Face didn't need a whole lot of discussion pre-deployment).

And for that reason it really is a fairly good first-order indication about whether it's a good idea to implement the field.

But of course, that isn't how it's viewed. What implementors instead take it to mean is "You'll never find documentation on this field, so if it looks useful to you, either examine the field itself or look at the source code of some MUA that uses it and then wing it." And that is a much more likely recipe for bad things to happen.

pr
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Pete Resnick <mailto:presnick(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)com>
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