From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Apr 16 2002 - 07:10:40 CDT
In <200204151659.27603@sendmail.mutz.com> Marc Mutz <mutz@kde.org> writes:
>Since I am in the process of merging news article and mail message handling
>code for Knode and Kmail, I'd prefer 4d ;-)
>Aside from selfishness, there's the argument that re-defining rfc2822 headers
>for usefor would slow down deployment of usefor compliant user agents, since
>many newsreaders share considerable amount of code with their respective mail
>reader brothers. The added complexity esp. w.r.t. the double meaning of ';'
>in certain headers makes buggy implementations a certainity.
>Also, I don't see the value that parameters for these headers could bring.
>Just define a new header.
I don't think ';' has any special meaning (outside of comments and quoted
strings and the like) in any RFC 2822 header, except for those that we are
thinking of removing in 4a.
>I could live with 4c, though, since 'Date' must already be parsed quite
>tolerantly, 'Keywords' isn't really used and some mailers already put stuff
>in Message-ID-like headers and use ';' as a separator IIRC. So mail readers
>can be expected to be quite tolerant w.r.t. to syntax changes in these
>headers.
My inclination is to remain at 4c on the strength of the responses so far.
Unless someone can point me at serious damage that would result if we
don't go to 4d. Your examples above seem to suggest that mail readers are
likely to be quite tolerant in most of the headers in question.
-- 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