Please see my original response to Amanda's proposal. The proposal was unclear
about what, if anything, would be removed from MIME/PEM in the realm of
non-cert-based services. The only thing that was clear was that key selectors
would go and so would any policy statements (I don't there are any of these to
remove). I read the proposal and I could not tell what the new requirements
would be.
Well, perhaps I read into Amanda's proposal what I wanted to find in it, and it
appears that you and I may have had a misunderstanding in common.
Since you have previously stated that hundreds of changes have been made that
the rest of us haven't seen, and perhaps she and Jim are clarifying and/or
modifying things that might either better explain their position, or persuade
me that things are not as bad as I have made them out to be, the prudent thing
to do would be to suspend further argument on this issue until the new draft is
released.
Let me also suggest a possible compromise that might make your insistance on
having non-cert forms a little easier for me to take. At present, my
understanding is that all of the features included in an RFC are mandatory, so
that implementors who claim RFC-compliance cannot pick and choose what portions
they would like to implement. Normally, that makes a great deal of sense, so
that there isn't an explosion of different subsets that would make
interoperability very difficult.
In this case, however, by insisting that the non-cert forms are mandatory, you
have put other implementors or potential implementors in the very awkward
position of having to do something that they are quite opposed to, or else not
building to that spec at all. In this case this seems unreasonable, in
particular if the user is not required to use those capabilities in any case.
My question, therefore, is whether you would consider labelling those features
which are presently at issue as implementor-optional?
Bob
--------------------------------
Robert R. Jueneman
GTE Laboratories
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Waltham, MA 02254
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Voice: 1-617-466-2820