69 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
69 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
MBOX-Line: From mrc+imap at panda.com Thu May 26 21:11:43 2011
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To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
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From: Mark Crispin <mrc+imap@panda.com>
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Date: Fri Jun 8 12:34:46 2018
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Subject: [Imap-protocol] History question.
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In-Reply-To: <4DDF06A9.2050608@logicprobe.org>
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References: <4DDEA412.6030305@aol.com> <4DDEDDD6.1040507@logicprobe.org>
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<alpine.BSO.2.00.1105261628370.892@morgaine.smi.sendmail.com>
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<2CB073A1-B421-4CFB-AE30-B17005C876A0@iki.fi>
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<alpine.OSX.2.00.1105261724000.973@hsinghsing.panda.com>
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<4DDF06A9.2050608@logicprobe.org>
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Message-ID: <alpine.OSX.2.00.1105262030000.973@hsinghsing.panda.com>
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On Thu, 26 May 2011, Derek Konigsberg wrote:
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> "Those who fail to understand network protocols are doomed to
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> reimplement them over port 80"
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Yeah, that's been the nightmare for the past decade or so.
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> I think Java makes it too easy to gloss over
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> the fundamentals that you really do need to understand.
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My point exactly.
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Then there are individuals who believe that a kid fresh out of college
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with nothing but Java is a superior Java programmer to an experienced
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individual that spends a week reading the Java book. Thus, we have mobile
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phones (are you paying attention, RIM?) that issue the message "Uncaught
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Java language exception" prior to turning the phone into a pocket warmer.
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> I think the most painful part of implementing an E-Mail client is
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> dealing with all the legacy charsets and encodings, and the different
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> ways they're encoded in what is essentially 7-bit US-ASCII. If I could
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> make one change, I'd declare that all human-readable protocol text was
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> UTF-8 (and preferably that anything not intended to be human readable
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> was just raw bytes inside a literal block).
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Indeed. The problem is that email predates UTF-8 - and for that matter
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Unicode - by about two decades. Email had largely been cast in stone in
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the mid 1970s; and that casting was complete by the early 1980s.
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The first non-ASCII email was Japanese; and they played ball with the
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ASCII world by using ISO 2022 to shift between ASCII and JIS. ISO 8859-1
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(Latin 1) wasn't until 1987.
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I was one of a group of individuals who tried to prevent the charset
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disaster in the early 1990s. We failed utterly. Our plan was to status
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quo of ASCII, ISO 8859-1, and Japan's ISO 2022 encoding; and then move on
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with ISO 10646 (Unicode) as the One True Character Set For The Internet.
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Certain individuals did not share that vision...
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> It would also be nice if the IMAP grammar made more complete use of the
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> parenthesized list format used by the majority of it.
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Yes. There should be a single syntax rule for all commands and responses,
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and fewer types: atom, number, string, and list. Atoms should be used
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exclusively for protocol tokens (thus abolishing the astring/nstring mess)
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I would also reform IMAP's Hollerith strings (literals) to send the entire
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command first (thus one complete line) and then the string payloads.
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-- Mark --
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http://panda.com/mrc
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Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch.
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Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
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