Re: The New SPF: overall outline

On Thu, 2004-05-20 at 15:20, Guillaume Filion wrote:

> 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.
Speaking of wizards, have you seen the new Wizard in operation on the
spf site?  Its simply fantastic!  Whomever worked on it (Meng?), its
kick-ass.

> 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.
Its the tags period that add the bloat.  I don't believe compromise is
necessary here.  The SPF language is beautifully and powerfully
described as is.  

> 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.
You don't need to convince any of us here who live on planet earth. 
There is a group of people who unfortunately think in a manner that I
would deem backwards, but at any rate the thinking is that, "Well gee,
processors and ram are so fast and so cheap these days, why not?!"  I
despise this thinking, and I believe it to be ignorant.  Just because
things are faster, better, stronger, cheaper, doesn't necessarily mean
we should start writing everything in interpretive languages and
wrapping the world in a nasty blanket of XML.

> 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 tell you what, someday when it IS actually useful, we can add it
in.  Until then, why don't we just proceed along as we have been all
along and continue to bask in the support that we've been getting. 
Surely its not a coincidence that SPF has gotten as far as it has on its
own merit?  I think we've got something fantastic here.

> I'll try to keep an open mind...
Heh.

Cheers,

James

-- 
James Couzens,
Programmer
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