[Standards] [Fwd: Re: Namespace well-formedness and RFC3920bis backwards compatibility]

[Dave Cridland]

On Fri Sep 19 11:20:18 2008, Sergei Golovan wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 2:10 PM, Dave Cridland <dave at cridland.net>  
> wrote:
> >
> > Instead, stanzas which are not namespace well formed SHOULD be  
> rejected by
> > the recipient [with a stanza error], and SHOULD NOT cause a  
> disconnect in
> > clients [ie, don't let this be a DOS]. Clients MUST NOT generate  
> XML which
> > is not namespace well formed [clients have no excuse for this  
> behaviour],
> > servers SHOULD NOT forward such XML and MUST NOT generate it  
> [newly minted
> > XML won't have this problem]. Servers MAY disconnect clients  
> which generate
> > bad XMLNS [potential DOS], however this does not apply to peer  
> servers.
> 
> I would say that this will not help at all (at least if we talk  
> about
> ejabberd). Ejabberd
> authors will just say that since there's no "MUST" which ejabberd
> violates then it
> is perfectly XMPP compliant. So, there's no any incentive to fix  
> the bug.

I'm afraid you've missed the point entirely.

If mandating perfectly namespace well-formed XML under all  
circumstances is so difficult, then we shouldn't be doing so.

Moreover, clients need to cope with bad XMLNS, because it exists now  
and is a real, genuine, problem that won't go away whether or not  
ejabberd, or M-Link, or however many other servers comply with a  
"namespace well-formed" MUST in the future.

Dave.
-- 
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