From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Apr 23 2001 - 11:57:54 CDT
In <Pine.BSI.3.91.1010414162001.17754B-100000@spsystems.net> Henry Spencer <henry@spsystems.net> writes:
>News servers are not the only things that parse news articles, and we
>found on C News that persistent attention to such seemingly-small details
>could make quite large differences in performance.
I think it is clear that all mainstream news software will understand
header-names in a case insensitive manner. If they can get extra benefit
by scanning for the "default" format before doing the case-conversion
stuff, then good luck to them.
But that is not the point. The real point is that all sorts of
inexperienced people are going to write their own filtering scripts to do
all sorts of things. They will write their scripts according to the
headers that they actually SEE on current Usenet articles, and will
certainly not have read our standard. So if posting agents follow our
SHOULD recommendation, then these scripts will be likely to work as
intended more often.
Now the commonenst sort of script of this type is the killfile. Are the
relular-expression interpreters built into common browsers case
insensitive when matching against header-names? I think not. So there we
have a definite interoperability argument, fully justifying the SHOULD.
>My concern is not so much that there's an obvious big win there, but that
>it costs us very little to leave the option open, and it might someday be
>useful. Pointing to a preferred form would also discourage pointless
>variation in capitalization.
And indeed headers written according to our convention are much easier for
a human to recognise. And humans, not machines, are our ultimate
customers.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5