From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Sat Apr 14 2001 - 16:11:50 CDT
Erland Sommarskog <sommar@algonet.se> writes:
> Now, that is a good argument for the text inherited from Son-of-1036.
> Headers are case-insensitive, and any agent that does not understand
> that is broken. Still, headers are not only looked at by machines. and
> only confusion if a newsreader starts to spit out headers like
> "neWsgrOUps: " just to be coOl.
RFC 822 explicitly states that all headers are case-insensitive, and I've
yet to see a newsreader or mail client that does that. I think we're
trying to solve a non-existent problem.
Anyway, what RFC 822 says is:
When matching any other syntactic unit, case is to be ignored.
For example, the field-names "From", "FROM", "from", and even
"FroM" are semantically equal and should all be treated ident-
ically.
When generating these units, any mix of upper and lower case
alphabetic characters may be used. The case shown in this
specification is suggested for message-creating processes.
I have no objections to saying something like that second paragraph, using
the word "suggested." I do object to anything stronger, including Ought,
and definitely including SHOULD.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>