David Barr wrote:
[Keith Moore wrote]
And if you had a shred of competency as an engineer or
protocol designer you'd be working on solutions to the very
real problems rather than trying to pretend that they don't exist.
The fact that there are almost a dozen different (and in many cases horribly
broken) encoding formats that are required now to implement an email
client/web browser is not a real problem?
The current Usefor draft requires UAs to support raw utf-8, which is an
encoding that is currently not required to be supported by text
message UAs. That's not "working on solutions", that's *compounding*
the real problem.
> The fact that messages floating
around often have to go through transformation after transformation,
encoding after encoding, just to get from one place to another, and that
*any* bugs or gaps with encoding along the way result in real breakage?
That is not a real problem?
The current Usefor draft would require gateways to perform
transformations which are not now required and which the
existing installed base of gateways does not now perform. That's
not "working on solutions", that's *compounding* the real problem.
> The fact that because of typical
desgin-by-committee and generational effects we now have a series of
protocols layered on top of each other that are horribly complex, vague, and
broken? And the fact that the vast majority of these problems would be
solved simply by having the balls to once and for all say "we shalt
transition all this shit to UTF-8"?
Because there are old messages, all of the existing methods need to
continue to be supported indefinitely so that those old messages can
still be read. A transition requires backward compatibility so that
the infrastructure doesn't suddenly break (as that would not constitute
a transition), and it requires a feasible plan. The Usefor draft
breaks backward compatibility and provides no feasible transition plan.
That's not "working on solutions", that's *compounding* the real problem.
Rather than actually solve problems, the IETF would rather add more duct
tape to an already structurally unsound system.
Text messages (822/2822 + MIME) as used by email and by Usenet under the
current standard (RFC 1036) works. Most of the core issues requiring urgent
attention that the Usefor WG was formed to address are already addressed
by MIME; all that would have been required is a relatively minor update
to RFC 1036. 822/2822 + MIME is structurally sound; what the Usefor draft
proposes would result in an unsound system due to the dead weight of the
Usefor draft "duct tape" (adding *additional* encodings in UAs and requiring
transformations in gateways where currently none are required).
This disturbs me.
If you genuinely believe that the Usefor draft solves problems rather
than compounding them, you are indeed seriously disturbed.