From: Henry Spencer (henry@spsystems.net)
Date: Mon Apr 28 2003 - 12:37:06 CDT
On Sat, 26 Apr 2003, Charles Lindsey wrote:
> > >>>2.3 The content of the first line of a header MUST NOT consist of WSP
> > >>> only (though such SHOULD be accepted). Observe that continuation
> > >>> lines of headers also MUST NOT consist of WSP only, as in RFC 2822.
>
> It was taken from son-of-1036. Perhaps Henry should speak up, but I
> think it is related to that obligatory SP after the ":". If some agent
> somewhere tries to remove trailing whitespace (not allowed, but that
> will not stop it from happening), then that SP may get removed as well...
Precisely. Like it or not, trailing whitespace is *not* reliably
preserved in Usenet transmission and storage, and it's best not to depend
on it, either for continuation parsing or for the obligatory SP. The
son-of-1036 rules in this area were designed to guarantee that trailing
whitespace was never significant in headers.
There is never any particularly good reason to use any of the forbidden
forms anyway...
Henry Spencer
henry@spsystems.net