On 20/1/06 12:12 PM, "Robert Sayre" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> It's not a "problem". It works now, and no one is going to run out and
> change the running code. If someone did do "alternate entry", I can
> see implementations getting patches to ignore those.

and patches for "alternate replies", and patches for "alternate
something-else", and patches for "alternate blah" and patches for "alternate
[anything but blank space]".

Yep, that's the smart way to write a spec. Write it such that
implementations need to patch around it's shortcomings. And of course these
use cases for patches won't be documented anywhere, and different
implementers will do different patches. Didn't we already go through this
with the bugs and ambiguities in the html spec?

> In fact, you don't even need a spec to help. Just start doing it. If it
> becomes common, there will be patches.

Why not just spec it properly now? We know this is a possibility, we know
that keying off "alternate" is casting too wide a net. This change is
backwards compatible, so why the resistance?

Anybody would think that wide deployment is an argument against making
things better. If so we'd all be doing stuff using gopher, not http; or
using html 1.0 not xhtml.

e.

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