Re: XML message format draft

[Chris Croome <chris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Graham

On Fri 07-Feb-2003 at 06:02:35PM +0000, Graham Klyne wrote:
> 
> "But is it good practice to produce email headers that are lower case?"
> 
> I don't think it's a *bad* practice. 

OK, but it's so uncommon that it doesn't seem to be a sensible thing
to do...

> Maybe the question to ask is: "Are there any known problems caused
> by sending emails with lower case email headers?".  

Good question. I don't know. However I do know that there are a
_lot_ of broken mail servers and mail clients out there and I can't
think of a good reason to risk upsetting other software when
producing software that sends out email. Sending things out in a
case sensitive way (using the norms) and accepting either seems the
best thing to do.

> Also, when I mentioned case normalization, lowercase is just one
> option (though the most likely option).

True.

> 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.

I'm not sure I really understand these two options, however the way
I see it is that when producing plain text mail to put over the net
it's probably best to stick to case conventions. When this email is
being produced from a XML templating system one can match the case
in the XML or do something with regular expressions (like this Perl module
does:

  http://search.cpan.org/author/NWIGER/Text-Header-1.03/Header.pm

Currently, due to being lazy we are doing the former, but using one
extra Perl module isn't a big deal so I'm easy on this issue.

Chris

-- 
Chris Croome                               <chris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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