From: Henry Spencer (henry@spsystems.net)
Date: Thu Jun 05 2003 - 11:59:06 CDT
On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, Russ Allbery wrote:
> >> Er, that doesn't follow. Netnews doesn't allow an empty header at all,
> >> and therefore says nothing about its semantics.
> > Actually, our draft does say that (4.2.6). Again, it came straight out of
> > Son-of-1036.
>
> Well, that's weird. Since when do standards specify the semantics of
> syntactically invalid data?
Son-of-1036 did syntactically permit empty headers, although it tried to
discourage their use. So there was no inconsistency there.
I don't believe our current draft actually succeeds in outlawing all empty
headers, if only because of the other-header escape hatch.
In any case, it is reasonable to state how common error situations should
be handled, in addition to describing the semantics of correct data.
Henry Spencer
henry@spsystems.net