begin quoting what Will Yardley said on Thu, Apr 04, 2002 at 06:02:59PM -0800: > > taking the attitude of "i'm right and the rest of the world is wrong" > only gets you so far... at least when you're already way outnumbered.
Look where it got the Internet. Sticking to documented RFCs, instead of the defacto standards of AOL and Compuserve and Fidonet, got us where we are today. It's not "I'm right and the rest of the world is wrong". It's "I'm one man, the RFCs are readable by everybody." Couple that with the fact that any mailer that is MIME-compliant can deal with PGP/MIME messages properly, even if they don't have PGP, and the choice seems clear. Ok, a lot of people are using an MUA that is *NOT* MIME-compliant; more people were using Compuserve and Fidonet when RFC 821 was written, to, and yet we stuck to our guns. Three years later, AOL came along, and we expected them to conform to RFCs if they wanted to talk to us. For a while, they tried to avoid it, but in the end, standards won out. RFC 1521 is 8.5 years old. People who choose not to follow it are on their own, by choice. That's their right. More power to 'em. Glad so many of 'em live in countries where they get to make stupid choices like that. That doesn't mean I have to violate standards to accomodate them. I violate the standard in exactly one place; a mailing list where the messages get nuked if they're MIME. I remain there because I like the list. I sign my messages inline because it follows the rules and annoys people, which may cause them to bitch to the moderator to allow MIME. Inline sigs, in my experience, annoy Outlook and Outlook Express users even more than PGP/MIME sigs. Outlook Express even has trouble with S/MIME, which Microsoft supports! Communication? I think I'm communicating more to the OE users by making them jump through hoops to read perfectly legitimate standard mail than I would by allowing Microsoft to drive my choices intead of RFCs.
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