From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Dec 17 2002 - 05:41:24 CST
In <Pine.LNX.4.44.0212161251410.27403-100000@localhost.localdomain> John Stanley <stanley@peak.org> writes:
>Henry Spencer (henry@spsystems.net):
>| Although the keyword "poster" is case-sensitive, followup agents MAY
>| choose to regognize case insensitive forms such as "Poster".
>Why may they choose to do this if they will never see it? Because maybe it
>will be appearing on the wire and isn't that important a thing to waste
>time worrying about whether the P is p or P or the o is O?
>Because the person posting has entered the value in a version reasonable
>for humans, and there is absolutely no reason for it not to be valid,
>other than "Henry Spencer said so"?
Yes, that is _exactly_ the reason for that MAY.
>The only reason to require a case-sensitive "poster" is if you really,
>honestly, truly expect there to be a newsgroup named "Poster" someday.
>Otherwise, this limitation exists only to stroke egos and prove that you
>can demand things that have no technical reason for being.
No, the only reason to require (MUST) a case-sensitive "poster" is that
much existing software will not work without it.
And the reason for going no higher than MAY is that it is a nuisance to
implement case insensitivity in the middle of a header where all the other
alternatives (newsgroup-names) require case sensitivity.
-- 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