ietf-822
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: BOF: Format-Flowed and Non-Western Charsets

2002-03-20 20:01:13


On 3/20/02 at 2:35 PM -0600, Eric Fischer wrote:

Please do not deprecate format=flowed or introduce a new format option.
There will be no hope of convincing software authors to follow the
standards if the standards keep changing.

OK, then tell us what we should do. The current format=flowed
document is broken for many charsets. It's unusable. It doesn't work.
So one way or the other the standard is going to change. The only
question is whether we should change the current standard (which
would be harder to implement for some charsets) or introduce a new
standard and deprecate the old one. Which would you like to choose?

Either change the definition of format=flowed or add a new format=foo
thing without deprecating format=flowed. I don't care which.

While I understand the ongoing cost of supporting format=flowed, I believe
the cost of deprecating format=flowed is much much greater. The previous
interations have been hugely damaging to the credibility of this effort
already. Do it again and you'll be completely marginalized, assuming you
aren't already.

                                Ned