[ietf-dkim] Re: Use of LWSP in ABNF -- consensus call

[Dave Crocker]

Harald Alvestrand wrote:
> Removing features that have proved to be a Bad Idea has always been 
> listed as one of the possible changes from Proposed to Draft - Draft to 
> Full happens so rarely that I would be hesitant to claim that there's 
> tradition for such changes there.

The question is the "proved to be" criterion.

The consensus call was triggered by one documented problem in 10 years.  We've 
had a posting claiming one additional problem (although my own recollection of 
that bit of history was the the list construct was the issue, rather than LWSP.)

So that is a total of at most 2 documented cases in 10-30 years.

And keep in mind that the issue is not that the rule "does not work" but that 
it is very rarely mis-used.

Were we to deprecate every feature in IETF specifications that get 
mis-implemented a couple of times over 10 years, I suspect much of our 
technology would be deprecated...

d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net