From: Erland Sommarskog (sommar-usefor@algonet.se)
Date: Wed Dec 20 2000 - 17:21:33 CST
[I find it remarkable that no one has answered Charles's article. Has
the listserver broken down?]
Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
> 3.2. Transitional Arrangements
>
> o The new style of Path header is already consistent with the
> previous standards. However, the intention is that relaying
> agents should eventually reject articles in the old style, and so
> this should be offered as a configurable option for relaying
> agents. User agents are unaffected.
> [X1. I have changed that "eventually" from "henceforth".
> X2. Should that "should" be a "SHOULD" or a "MAY" or an "Ought to", or left
> as a "should"?]
Left as "should". SHOULD or any other formal word followed by the
vague "eventually" sounds like an oxymoron to me.
> 4.2.1. Names and Contents
>
> Header-names SHOULD be either those for which a USENET-header-content
> is defined in this standard, or those defined in [MESSFOR], or those
> defined in any extension to either of these standards including, in
> particular, the Mime standards [RFC 2045] et seq., or experimental
> headers beginning with "X-" (as defined in 4.2.2.1). Software SHOULD
> NOT attempt to interpret headers not described in this standard or in
> its extensions, but relaying agents MUST pass them on unaltered and
> reading agents MUST enable them to be displayed, at least optionally.
> [X3. last MUST -> Ought???]
Yes, it seems so.
> Header-names are case-insensitive. There is a preferred case
> convention, which posters and posting agents SHOULD use: each
> hyphen-separated "word" has its initial letter (if any) in uppercase
> and the rest in lowercase, except that some abbreviations have all
> letters uppercase (e.g. "Message-ID" and "MIME-Version"). The forms
> used in this standard are the preferred forms for the headers
> described herein. Relaying and reading agents MUST, however, tolerate
> articles not obeying this convention.
> [X4. SHOULD -> Ought to???]
But header-names are part of the protocol. Saying case-insensitive is
"liberal in what you recieve" and mandating a case convention is
"conservative in what you sent". Thus: SHOULD.
> 4.2.2.2. Inheritable Headers
>
> Subject only to the overriding ability of the poster to determine the
> contents of the headers in a proto-article, headers with the
> inheritable property MUST be copied by followup agents (perhaps with
> some modification) into the followup article, and headers without
> that property MUST NOT be so copied. Examples include:
> [X5. I hope nobody wants those MUSTs -> Oughts]
Violating them, would be violating the spirit of these headers, so yes
that must be a MUST. Or possibly a SHOULD.
> NOTE: Though header-contents are defined in such a way that
> folding can take place between many of the lexical tokens (and
> even within some of them), folding SHOULD be limited to placing
> the CRLF at higher-level syntactic breaks, and SHOULD also avoid
> leaving trailing WSP on the preceding line. For instance, if a
> header-content is defined as comma-separated values, it is
> recommended that folding occur after the comma separating the
> structured items, even if it is allowed elsewhere.
> [X6. Anyone want to SHOULD -> Ought there (twice)?]
I've never understood all that case-folding business, but as I gathered
some agents may stumble if two weird things are used, so SHOULD seems
reasonable.
> Since the white space beginning a continuation line remains a part of
> the logical line, headers can be "broken" into multiple lines only at
> FWS or CFWS. Posting agents SHOULD NOT break headers unnecessarily
> (but see 4.5).
> [X7. Anyone want to SHOULD -> Ought there?]
I could accept it.
> 4.2.5. Undesirable Headers
>
> Headers that merely state defaults explicitly (e.g., a Followup-To
> header with the same content as the Newsgroups header, or a Mime
> Content-Type header with contents "text/plain; charset=us-ascii") or
> state information that reading agents can typically determine easily
> themselves (e.g. the length of the body in octets) are redundant and
> posters and posting agents Ought Not to include them.
> [X8. Was SHOULD NOT]
Yup.
Oops, the news server I was waiting for is up again. I'll come back
to the others later.
-- Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, sommar@algonet.se