On Wednesday 24 March 2004 04:46, wayne wrote:
I'm going to take this opportunity to rant about design, specification
and implementation philosophies. It's a long rant, but I think it is
important.
[good points snipped as I cut to the chase]
I realize that there is a lot of room for reasonable people to
disagree about what is "the conservative thing to do". I also realize
that it takes a lot more work to strictly check the input for any and
all errors and then decide what the right thing to do if an error is
found. However, with email being so important and the need for it to
be reliable, I think we should go the JVM route rather than the web
browser route.
I'd agree, and when it comes to SPF records and their formats the "liberal in
what you accept" can extend to flexibility about whitespace and case and
order or arguments, but the syntax itself should be strict. This is what
tends to work best for other systems - allow people to lay things out nicely
etc but the key words are key words.
The other key area for flexibility is where a spec is seen later to be
ambiguous or to say nothing: items such as timing, synchronicity, and data
sizes (ie no fixed lengths or arbitrary limits) - dare I suggest a corollary
of "be generous in the small as long as you can be assured of the integrity
of the bigger picture".
Cheers
--
Tim