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

2002-02-01 12:27:25

In <a05100300b87f5ac633de(_at_)[216(_dot_)43(_dot_)25(_dot_)67]> Pete Resnick 
<presnick(_at_)qualcomm(_dot_)com> writes:


On 1/31/02 at 3:23 PM -0500, Keith Moore wrote:

I don't know where you get the idea that x-headers have been quite a 
problem.  As far as I can tell, they've been quite successful.

Offhand I cannot think of a single read/write X- field that has 
become a de facto standard...

X-Priority immediately comes to mind. X-Face is another. And these 
are perfect examples of the problem: They define perfectly useful or 
interesting pieces of data, they are in widespread use, but the 
format of the fields cannot be documented because some bozo chose to 
name them with an X-.

X-No-Archive: ...

 But even write-only fields are a problem: I 
can't document for someone what exactly to put in X-Mailer because it 
starts with an X-. That's a terrible state of affairs and a serious 
problem.

Actually that's not so bad, since nobody cares what you actually put
inside it. But it is badly named (it only applies to mailers), which is
why Usefor is proposing to standardize User-Agent (which it borrowed brom
HTTP).


But that's the point: You can't distinguish useful/good fields from 
bogus/bad fields just by seeing if they start with an X-. And in 
fact, if people would just register a field that they are about to 
deploy, they would likely get some immediate feedback of its 
boneheadedness when they go to document it.

Exactly. We provide machinery with enough hoops for them to jump through
that someone gets to look at it and provide the feedback, but not so many
hoops that they say "What the Heck!" and just go ahead without us.

Now here's a fine example for you all to look at. And it was generated by
widely deployed software (ezmlm). Perhaps someone can tell me which of
these headers are "official" in any sense:

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