Hey, you never got around to the footnote. Although at some point we may want to break into 8-bit ascii, unicode etc. Our intent with MCP 1.0 was that we be able to use MOO's built-in word splitter to parse the opening line into message, auth key, keywords, and values. These days that goal seems less important to me, but I haven't seen a good reason to abandon it.
Any divergence is probably a bug in the spec.