Date: Fri, 5 Jan 1996 12:26:59 +0100 (MET)
From: Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se>
To: Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>
cc: ietf-drums <drums@cs.utk.edu>, moore@cs.utk.edu
Subject: Re: The conservative and liberal commandment 
In-Reply-To: <199601050601.BAA02630@wilma.cs.utk.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.960105122135.1142C-100000@ester.dsv.su.se>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

On Fri, 5 Jan 1996, Keith Moore wrote:

> Of course, even if our old standards aren't to blame for 
> the problem, doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to give good 
> advice to implementors when rewriting them.  Advice as to
> what constitutes conservative when sending and liberal 
> when receiving certainly falls into this category.  The trick
> is to make sure that such advice isn't confused with the
> protocol specifications.

I think it should be in the standards document. The standards
document is the document which implementors read in order to
know how they should program their mail programs. And the
advice examples I gave (I am sure there are many more)
should be as important to implementors as the standards
themselves - at least if we want implementors to produce
systems which will work well against other systems in
the Internet.

One choice is to include this in special paragraphs which
start with the word "Advice:". Example

   Advice: Avoid sending messages with lines longer than 80
   characters per line, but be prepared to accept messages
   with lines with up to 1000 characters.

Another choice would be to put the advice in an appendix.
However, putting it directly in the standard at the place
where the standard talks about line length will maximize
the probability that the implementor will read it.

Can we decide to include this kind of advice in the drums
documents (both the SMTP and RFC822 document)?

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme