A recommendation to applications is hardly as noteworthy as a written spec. Most clients (rightly) go by the spec, as you can see in this thread (PHP and Ruby have been mentioned; Python's urllib.urlopen also fails to properly parse the CR out of headers). So, no, that doesn't help the fact that the current production server violates the spec and breaks most mainstream http clients in the process, and does so with any oversight that is trivial to fix (which should never have made it into production and indeed already has been fixed in the repo).