4 ms·
I think that would depend a lot on what the extensions contain. I think extensions are a decent idea when they're obscure functionality that would take a lot of
by dale_glass 4y ago
I think that would depend a lot on what the extensions contain. I think extensions are a decent idea when they're obscure functionality that would take a lot of work to implement.
Complexity has exploded as of late. It used to be a joke that programs grew until they became able to read mail. These days programs grow until they contain a web engine. It's not enough anymore to just have a chat window, the chat window has to generate thumbnails of webpages for you.
- Gigachad 4y agoSomething should either be in the protocol or not. No one likes a situation where you see a feature on your client and it sometimes works or sometimes doesn't depending on the situation. We would be better off having a smaller selection of better software over 100 different email server implementations which can't agree on a basic set of features gmail had a decade ago.
- masklinn 4y agoThat means a protocol can not evolve in time to integrate new needs of clients and / or servers.
- Gigachad 4y agoIt can, you bump the protocol version number and move on. Give some grace period of compatibility and then shut off the old version.
- masklinn 4y agoThat's an optional extension by any other name. You can't "give some grace period of compatibility" in an open / distributed ecosystem, every version of the protocol lives forever. YAML's dumb fuzzy booleans still cause issues all the time even though Yaml 1.2 was released 13 years ago.
- Gigachad 4y agoHTTP manages this pretty well. It's pretty common practice to turn off old http and TLS versions and things move along fine because the vast majority of users are on the latest version.