From: Henry Spencer (henry@spsystems.net)
Date: Wed May 21 2003 - 12:38:47 CDT
On Wed, 21 May 2003, Usenet News Support wrote:
> Either we allow header continuation or not.
There are many things that we allow only restricted forms of. The
compatibility issues, if nothing else, on this one strike me as
overwhelming.
The mandatory-whitespace-after-colon rule, and its side effects, are
blemishes. But they are far too entrenched in existing software to
consider removing them, not if we want people to pay attention to this
standard.
> Clearly we should require some
> non-blank content on the line, but the header name satisfies that.
The header name is not part of the content. Content, by definition, is
what comes after the name, colon, and white space.
Henry Spencer
henry@spsystems.net