From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Wed Sep 18 2002 - 21:10:55 CDT
Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
> Charles Lindsey wrote:
>> The headers we are talking about are:
>> Date
>> Message-ID
>> Sender
>> Keywords
>> References
>> Supersedes
>> Since those are the ones that occur in RFC 2822 (except Supersedes, which
>> is really a news header that mail has "borrowed").
> Supersedes was officially defined in RFC 2156, January 1998, as a
> modification of "Obsoletes" used in RFC 1327 (May 1992). There is no
> mention of news in 2156, and there is no definition of Supersedes in RFC
> 1036. What is the source of your claim?
Supersedes support was already present in INN 1.0, which was released in
1991. It's one of the most widely used news article format features that
isn't mentioned in RFC 1036.
That being said, it's not clear to me that the mail implementation is at
all based on the news implementation; it could well be a case of parallel
development. (It would have been nice if there had been an updated news
RFC around 1995, so that the mail folks may have been aware of that work.)
>> BTW, can someone tell me whether "References" is an email header that
>> was adopted by news, or a news header that was adopted by
>> email. Whichever, it must have been a long time ago.
> References is in 822, which 1036 uses as the baseline message format.
> It's also in RFC 733, 822's predecessor. And in 724 before that. I
> don't know whether or not it was in RFC 680, but it was not in 561.
The header is a long-standing mail header, but the syntax standardized in
RFC 2822 is essentially a news invention. The RFC 822 syntax is very
loose, practically a free-form comment field, with no specification of
what message IDs to include or how to organize them.
The strict syntax used in news is a direct result of support for
threading, something that was used on Usenet long before it became popular
in mail.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>