The problem of describing the T1 compactifications of a given T1 space arises quite naturally in many contexts, and has been approached from a number of directions. One characteristic of all approaches has been the exclusive consideration of strict topological extensions. There are obvious advantages to this approach. Points of the compactification may be distinguished by their trace filters, and the topology of the compactification is readily described in a natural manner. Moreover every T2 compactification is strict, so the method loses no generality in this most important special case.