Re: [EAI] double angle brackets

[Andrew Sullivan <ajs at crankycanuck.ca>]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 07:02:09PM +0200, Harald Alvestrand wrote:
> As I've said several times before, the situation where <<>> has value is  
> the situation where an EAI user sends a message to both an EAI user and  
> a non-EAI user, and the non-EAI user replies to the message.
>
> Shawn, if you think that in this scenario, it's OK that the recipient  
> EAI user does not get the reply from the non-EAI user, please say so  
> explicitly.

As someone who has more or less stopped participating in this WG, I
just want to note that the above amounts to a serious and important
restriction on "backward compatibility".  If the recipient EAI user is
the loser from the non-EAI user, this really means that non-EAI users
(i.e. the non-adopters) lose something, _but also_ that the EAI users
(the adopters) lose something.

I am completely uninformed about the values in play in that trade-off,
and I have no opinion at all on how it ought to go.  But it's a pretty
serious limitation of interoperability between strictly-822-derived
systems and EAI, and it seems to me the WG has to have a strong
statement of the ways that interoperability is expected to succeed and
the ways it is expected to fail.  (Note that I regard "often" as an
acceptable answer.  But clarity is really important.)

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at crankycanuck.ca