Paul Hoffman wrote:
At 4:32 PM -0700 4/8/06, Michael Thomas wrote:
Paul Hoffman wrote:
At 4:14 PM -0700 4/8/06, Michael Thomas wrote:
Add a new paragraph at the end of section 1.1:
A DKIM signature is intended to be verifiable for about the length
of time of that it would take to transport the message in SMTP;
this is almost always less than two weeks. The signature is not
intended to be used for archival purposes, and verification of the
signature after this period is not an intended or desired feature
of the DKIM protocol.
This text doesn't seem to be able to make up its mind if it's
informational
or normative.
I have no idea what you mean. It is normative.
"for about" and "almost always" are normative?
Yes. They specify the semantics of DKIM signatures in a way to which
implementers are fully expected to adhere. They are not informative or
optional. They are prescriptive.
As a developer, I haven't a clue as to what would satisfy this kind of
normative requirement.
This is not implementable or testable
as written.
True, but "testable" is not the same as normative, at least in the
IETF sense (which I fully admit is not defined in any RFC I could
find). Having said that, if anyone has a suggestion of how to tighten
the wording to make it seem more definitive without forcing policy on
the verifier, that would be great.
Normative text that leads to different --and nearly arbitrary --
implementation
decisions is not my idea of good normative text. The problem here isn't the
wording, it's the intent of trying to be normative with informative text.
Mike
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