Subject: [xmpp] 3920bis: namespace-well-formedness again

From: Peter Saint-Andre <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:21:08 -0700

At the recent XMPP Summit in Brussels, Matthew Wild pointed out to me a
contradiction in the text about namespace-well-formedness in
draft-ietf-xmpp-3920bis-04. The text states:

***

   An XMPP entity MUST NOT generate data that is not namespace-well-
   formed.  An XMPP server SHOULD NOT route or deliver data that is not
   namespace-well-formed, and SHOULD return a stanza error of <not-
   acceptable/> or a stream error of <xml-not-well-formed/> in response
   to the receipt of such data.

      Note: Because these restrictions were underspecified in an earlier
      revision of this specification, it is possible that
      implementations based on that revision will send data that does
      not comply with the restrictions; an entity SHOULD be liberal in
      accepting such data.

***

I propose changing "SHOULD NOT" to "MUST NOT" and "SHOULD" to "MUST" in
the first paragraph, and removing the clause "an entity SHOULD be
liberal in accepting such data" from the second paragraph. I see no good
reason to be liberal in this respect, given that that a server has no
way to properly route such data to another server or outside the context
of the stream (typically data would violate the rule about
namespace-well-formedness if the sender specified the namespace
declaration on the stream header instead of on the stanza).

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
https://stpeter.im/