From: Brad Templeton (brad@templetons.com)
Date: Sun Apr 29 2001 - 14:27:41 CDT
On Sun, Apr 29, 2001 at 12:23:46PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Dirk Nimmich <nimmich@uni-muenster.de> writes:
> > Russ Allbery wrote:
>
> >> I *really* don't like the idea of news servers munging the
> >> article content in order to include site-specific information.
> >> We're stuck with Xref
>
> > Are we? Xref is overview information, why not deprecate it as we
> > did with the Lines header? (BTW: There should be a note why we
> > deprecated it; otherwise that will certainly a FAQ.)
>
> I think there are probably too many implemented news readers that expect
> to be able to find the Xref header in the article headers, plus there's
> Xref slaving.
>
> Including Xref into overview is a relatively recent thing, and there are
> still many sites that don't do it (it's not required).
There were two different proposals for how to identify local headers, so
they can be distinguished from others, with XRef grandfathered in but
eventually changed.
The first was to have them start with L-, however later I felt that
the use of MIME syntax made more sense, since new headers should be defined
in an extensible fashion anyway.
Perhaps something like 'any header with a ;site="domain.name" tag on it
is a local header, and should be either not fed downstream, or ignored and
discarded by sites that do not match the domain'