From: John Stanley (stanley@peak.org)
Date: Fri Jul 09 2004 - 13:55:03 CDT
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu):
>Numerous other systems make use of structure in the Subject header.
I think the relevant point there is that they are "other systems". News
does not make use of structure, or at least, is wrong when it does,
because the header is defined to be unstructurd, in both simple english
and formal definition.
What a mailing list manager program, or held desk system, does with
Subject is outside the scope of news and mail, since they are the
consumers of the product and not the system transporting it.
Were I to create a calendar program that uses some structure in a line
in the data that is passed to it that starts with "Subject: ", that would
not create structure for the systems used to transport that data, only in
the calendar program. If you believe this does create structure for the
transports, then explain how you can enforce this structure, or even
define it, for "a file on disk", or "cat", or "|", or any of the other
means I can use to transport the data to the destination program.