On Thu, 2004-05-20 at 17:20, Guillaume Filion wrote:
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.
If you think of the current SPF key/optional-value pairs syntax similar
to "Header Fields" as described in section 2.2 of RFC 2822, but slightly
simpler (some non-alphanumerics in the key portion, optional field
bodies, no embedded whitespace in the field body, terminated by
whitespace and not newlines, (which are essentially byte classification
changes)), then all MTAs already have SPF syntax parsers embedded in
them.
If email was transmitted and stored in an XML format, then I think it
would make sense to use XML for other things that an MTA/MDA/MUA may
have to deal with -- SMTP-NG transactions may very well be in XML for
all (meta)data. I'm not sure what to think when things like "you never
know what you're going to want to add later" are said and yet the simple
2822-style header format (which SPF syntax appears very similar to) has
served us so well, and proven its extensibility (maybe not as much as
we'd like, but still), for so long.
--
Andy Bakun: we can pull it off
<abakun(_at_)thwartedefforts(_dot_)org>