From: Bruce Lilly (blilly@erols.com)
Date: Sun Jun 15 2003 - 23:39:58 CDT
Thorfinn wrote:
> 1. I definitely want USEXXX to require, at least as a SHOULD,
SHOULD is a recommendation, not a requirement. A requirement uses
MUST. See RFC 2119.
> 5. I think that arguing about "oh but it's a magic unstructured header,
> so how can we possibily impose requirements on it" is just plain silly.
> It's an extremely minor semantic point, and not one that is terribly
> relevant.
The issue is syntactic, not semantic.
> This is a standards document, we can impose any kind of silly
> requirements we want. We do want to impose requirements that will be
> listened to,
Do you really think authors will pay attention to "you MUST do foo
and MUST NOT do bar, but the user may override that and either do bar
or not do foo"?
> but I think that the tiny semantic point of "unstructured
> vs structured" headers is not significant to the vast vast majority of
> software authors and users. I suspect that most of them just consider
> them all as "headers", without bothering to make some magic distinction
> between structured and unstructured.
Again, the issue is syntax. There are things that apply to structured header
fields but not unstructured fields and vice versa. For example, an
encoded-word may appear anywhere in an unstructured field, but may only
appear in a comment or in a "phrase" in a structured field. Software (and
its authors) that fail to make the distinction result in non-conforming
applications. See RFC 2047 sections 6 & 7.