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Re: XML message format draft


Chris,

I think I now have some idea of your concern.

"But is it good practice to produce email headers that are lower case?"

I don't think it's a *bad* practice. Maybe the question to ask is: "Are there any known problems caused by sending emails with lower case email headers?". Also, when I mentioned case normalization, lowercase is just one option (though the most likely option).

This is an issue to which I've not previously given adequate thought. I see two choices:

(a) adopt some case-normalized form (e.g. all lowercase) for all header names in XML, and copy them as-is into RFC2822 messages. This has the advantage of being pretty simple to implement in a completely generic fashion. But note the question above.

(b) adopt a standard spelling w.r.t. upper/lower case for all headers. This may be more stylish, but I think it raises problems in the scenarios you mention, particularly when trying to map from RFC2822 messages to XML in a generic fashion: what to do about previously unknown header field names? This looks rather problematic to me.

Any other ideas?

#g
--

At 03:34 PM 2/7/03 +0000, Chris Croome wrote: 
> >One other issue that has come up for me is the situation when XML
> >is being used to generate plain text emails -- using case
> >sensitive element names saves writing code to generate headers
> >with the correct case from all lower case XML elements -- what do
> >you think about this?
>
> Er, I don't see the problem here.  RFC2822 header field names are
> case insensitive, so the corresponding XML element names could be
> used as-is.

But is is good practive to produce email headers that are lower
case?

This issue has come up is when we have wanted to produce XML
templates for generating email, for example:

  <From
    petal:define="config here/config --flo.plugin.Account"
    petal:contents="config/mail_from">newsletter@xxxxxxxxx</From>

  <To
    petal:contents="here/ticket/email">fred.flintstone@xxxxxxxxx</To>

Here the element names are in the case thet we want the email
headers to be generated in. We could use all lowercase element names
but then we would want to write some code to 'correct' the case of
the headers just because no one else generates lower case headers
(have you ever seen any?).

Chris

PS I did try lowercasing all the headers in this email but my MUA
(mutt) corrected them for me!


-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>