CRLF is obsolete and should be abolished

What a weird reaction. Microsoft’s use of CRLF is an archaic pain in the ass. Taking a position that it should be deprecated isn’t radical or irresponsible — Microsoft makes gratuitous changes to things all of the time, why not this one?

Hipp is probably one of the better engineering leaders out there. His point of view carries weight because of who he is, but should be evaluated on its merits. If Microsoft got rid of this crap 30 years ago, when it was equally obsolete, we wouldn’t be having this conversation; if nobody does, our grandchildren will.

No one is talking about Microsoft and whatever it does on its platform, the parent comment is about network protocols (HTTP, SMTP and so on..).

I understand that it is tempting to blame Microsoft for \r\n proliferation, but it does not seem to be the case - the \r\n is comes from the era of teletypes and physical VT terminals. You can still see the original "NL" in action (move down only, do not go back to start of line) on any Unix system by typing "(stty raw; ls)" in a throw-away terminal.

CRLF was the correct way to implement a new line the way we think of it now, because teletypes and typewriters considered the “return to the 0th column” and “go to the next line” to be different things that are each valid on their own.

CRLF was the standardized way to implement “go down one line and return to column zero” and they’re the only ones who implemented new lines correctly at the outset.

Blaming Microsoft now, because they like backwards compatibility above almost everything else, is misplaced and myopic.

I didn't say we shouldn't get rid of it. I'm saying we shouldn't intentionally break existing protocols.

Additionally it is also dishonest to bring Microsoft into the discussion like that. The discussion revolved around _standardized_ network protocols, which is entirely unrelated to MS-DOS text formats.

He's not arguing for deprecating it. He's arguing for just not complying and hoping for the best. He explicitly says so right in the article.

That is never the right approach. You intentionally introduce a problem you expect others to fix. All because he doesn't like 0x0d. The protocol is what it is. If you want to make more sane decisions when designing a new protocol (or an explicitly newer version of some existing one) then by all means, go for it. But intentionally breaking existing ones is not the way to go.

The author of the post specifically addressed this:

“Today, CR is represented by U+000d and both LF and NL are represented by U+000a. Almost all modern machines use U+000a to mean NL exclusively. That meaning is embedded in most programming languages as the backslash escape \n. Nevertheless, a minority of machines still insist on sending a CR together with their NLs”

Who is the “minority”?

He also takes the position that the legacy behavior is fine for a tty, as it’s emulating a legacy terminal.