D. J. Bernstein wrote:
It is not reasonable to demand that this
7-bit garbage be allowed to remain on the network forever, at the
expense of all future implementors and users.
OK, you're obviously in a better position than I am to appreciate the cost
to implementors. But users? Suppose you could streamline qmail by
dropping support for talking to 7-bit servers. How do you convince a
postmaster to install it? The bandwidth cost of having to use 7-bit
encoding is real, but small; the cost of losing connectivity to sites is
potentially high. Worse, it's almost impossible to put an upper bound on
the cost of lost connectivity. For a company, it could mean losing
messages (and sales) from important customers; businesses have failed over
such things.
For commercial implementors, it's a no-brainer: dropping 7-bit support
will lose customers, so don't do it. For open-source implementors such as
yourself, naturally, things are less clear-cut.
/==============================================================\
|John Stracke |Principal Engineer |
|jstracke(_at_)incentivesystems(_dot_)com |Incentive Systems, Inc. |
|http://www.incentivesystems.com |My opinions are my own. |
|==============================================================|
|"This [OLE] isn't an API, this is a shaggy dog story in C!" --|
|Unknown |
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