[Email-SIG] API for Header objects [was: Dropping bytes "support" in json]

[R. David Murray]

On Fri, 17 Apr 2009 at 13:37, Tony Nelson wrote:
> At 19:09 +0900 04/17/2009, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>> Tony Nelson writes:
>>
>> I agree with you that we should make it relatively difficult to put
>> things that *don't* conform to the RFCs on the wire.  But that should
>> be the responsibility of the middleware that talks to the file system
>> and to the MTA.  I see no reason *at this stage* to burden MUA (in the
>> general sense) developers with all the RFC rules, and MDA/MTA writers
>> "should" only need to worry about it for error handling (__bytes__()
>> should normally do the job for them).  (For values of "should"
>> equivalent to "in my dreams", I do fear.)
>
> You are insisting on is so burdening them.  I propose lifting that burden.

I don't see how Stephen and my proposals burden the developer
more than yours.  In fact, I'm pretty sure it's the opposite
way around.

>>> This makes it very important that the easy way of doing things be
>>> the correct way.  With Address fields, that way is
>>
>> Nonsense.  You are ignoring the fact that *people* (ie, nobody
>> participating in this thread<wink>) read an address field *as text*,
>> and they type in addresses *as text*.  We do not extract and inject
>> this information as pickles of Header objects via Firewire sockets
>> implanted in their skulls.  There is *no /unique/ correct way* here.
>
> If only "People" did that in a way that survived transport.

I don't understand that comment.  It's the email package's job to provide
a way for the programmer (the user of the email package's API) to allow
the text entered by the user (the person actually sending and receiving
messages) to survive transport.

--David