On 08Feb18, John R. Levine allegedly wrote:
On Thu, 8 Feb 2018, Mark Delany wrote:
Heh. I'm still waiting to hear a good reason as to why "v=" exists at all -
apart
from exposing brittle parsers which mistakenly expect it to show up as the
first
tag.
I had a draft that invented v=2, for headers with a tag syntax that is not
quite backward compatible with the current spec. I realize that we could
change the header to DKIM-Improved-Signature but the change was small and
it smelled to me like the same header.
Yes, one can certainly contrive a situation in which they prefer a v=2 solution,
but as you say, the requirement can be just as easily satisfied in a number of
other ways too.
A new header is one as is the presence of a new tag and v= is a third. There are
other ways as well.
Given we're talking about standards, it's de rigueur that we end up with at
least three competing ways of achieving the same outcome without any guidance
whatsoever as to which mechanism to choose when and why.
Underlying all this of course is the assumption that programmers intuit the
possibility of change inherent in these non-essential mechanisms and code and
test accordingly. Now that's a goodun.
Mark.
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