"Meng Weng Wong" <mengwong(_at_)dumbo(_dot_)pobox(_dot_)com> wrote:
This is a rough outline of the convergence between SPF and Caller-ID
that Wayne, Greg, Mark, and Meng (from SPF), and Harry, Bob, and Jim
(from Microsoft) worked out during this week of MAAWG and MARID
meetings.
First, let me say that I'm impressed with what you came up with. At
first
sight, the idea of a RFROM extension looks great. Also, the convergence
of
SPF and Caller-ID is a big step toward global use of this future RFC.
The only thing that annoys me is the dual syntax proposal.
SYNTACTIC CONVERGENCE
* To XML Believers, there is no extensible syntax but XML.
Surprisingly, though Meng is not a member of this religion, when he
wanted to object to this, he suddenly felt like a teenage punk
telling his elders that they don't know what it's like, man. Doing
XML just feels like listening to the advice of the elders.
I understand that feeling, there are some "historical patterns" that
you just
feel are better than others. There are mainly three things that concern
me with XML in DNS:
1) Ease of writing the syntax.
2) Size of the rule -- it has to fit in a UDP DNS datagram.
3) Obligation of having an XML parser in the SMTP server.
1 can be taken care of with well made wizzards, it's not as good as
having a simple syntax to begin with, but it's a fair compromise.
For number 2, one can try to keep the tags as short as possible, it's
still not as good as not having to open and close each tag, but it's
another compromise.
Number 3 is the worst, most Windows and some Unix servers allready have
an XML parser, but there are a lot of smaller SMTP servers that do not.
An XML parser is a fat cat, the expat tarball is 290 KB while qmail's
tarball is 215 KB. I have another "historical pattern" feeling here,
when one feature is bigger than the rest of the program.
I'm trying as hard as I can to convince myself that XML is a better
idea than a simple text syntax. The argument that "someday it might be
useful" does not seem worth the compromises that we'd have to make
right now.
I'll try to keep an open mind...
GFK's
--
Guillaume Filion, ing. jr
Logidac Tech., Beaumont, Québec, Canada - http://logidac.com/
PGP Key and more: http://guillaume.filion.org/