From: Charles Lindsey (chl@cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Apr 14 2003 - 13:56:25 CDT
Just to let you know what is happening, and why this list has been empty
for a week. My incoming mail is severely broken; a screwup by the local
BOFH of horrendous proportions.
So I am in fact reading this list from the landfield website and
replying that way. Not a nice way to conduct business :-( .
I am told things will be fixed on Wednesday - I will believe it when I
see it. At that time, I hope normal service will be resumed, and I will
have some material for your consideration.
On Sun Apr 13 2003 - 08:54:57 CDT
Boris 'pi' Piwinger (3.14@logic.univie.ac.at) said...
> I only have very few remarks:
>
> >4.2.3. White Space and Continuations
>
>
> >
> > Each header is logically a single line of characters comprising the
> > header-name, the colon with its following SP, the content, and any
> > parameters. For convenience, however, the content and parameters can
> > be "folded" into a multiple line representation by inserting a CRLF
> > before any WSP contained within any FWS or CFWS (but not any other SP
> > or HTAB) allowed by this standard. For example, the header:
> > Approved: modname@modsite.example (Moderator of example.foo.bar)
> > can be represented as:
> > Approved: modname@modsite.example
> > (Moderator of example.foo.bar)
>
> This seems to be a bad example. As explained CRLF is
>
> inserted, but actually also two additional spaces are added
> in the example. Clearly, it does not hurt here, just for the
> sake of correctness.
>
> Since there has been confusion how to unfold correctly, this
>
> could be made even more explicit here.
OK, I have changed the indent to just a single SP.
>
> >5.4. Subject
>
> > Followup agents MAY remove strings that are known to be used
>
>
> > erroneously as back-reference (such as "Re(2): ", "Re:", "RE: ", or
> > "Sv: ") from the Subject-content when composing the subject of a
> > followup, and add a correct back-reference in front of the result.
>
> Actually some program (Outlook Express) removes anything up ...
Yes, it was a long time ago we wrote that. We knew that there were all
sorts of broken implementations around - too many to list. So we just
set out the *Proper* way to do it.
> >
> > In the following examples, please note that only "Re: " is mandated
> > by this standard. "was: " is a convention used by many English-
> > speaking posters to signal a change in subject matter. Software can
> > always recognize such changes from the References-header.
And we discussed that one too, and decided it was best left as a
convention (note that some software does try to parse the "Re: ", which
is why it is useful to try and do it right.
However, our future plans include splitting off all the "convention"
stuff into a separate "Good Netkeeping" informational RFC, so that would
be a good time to revisit this issue if people want to take it further.
>
> I don't understand the sentence " Software can always
>
> recognize such changes from the References-header." Does
> that mean that the software can determine that it is a
> followup?
You can always recognize a followup from the presence of a References
header. So even if a followup changes the Subject, and removes any
"Re: ", you can still detect that it was a folluwup by looking at the
References header (and you can even locate the precursor that way).
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