From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Mar 18 2004 - 06:03:44 CST
In <40585281.7020302@erols.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
>Charles Lindsey wrote:
>>
>> It DOES NOT mandate any particular definitions (because that is not what
>> IANA Registries are for), and it DOES make provision for different
>> protocols to define a given header differently.
>>
> Benefits of a central registry for message header field names
> include:
> o discouraging multiple definitions of a header field name for
> different purposes;
>N.B. "discouraging multiple definitions of a header field name
>for different purposes" and "encouraging convergence of header
>field name usage across multiple applications".
"discouraging" is NOT the same thing as "forbidding".
Yes, it is useful where interoperability between media is anticipated for
the specifications of headers to be as similar as possible. Syntactic
differences in particular need to be watched (even so, there are various
syntactic differences in headers between USEFOR and RFC 2822, though none
likely to cause trouble). But small semantic differences, such as where
the document for one medium ascribes meaning to certain strings in
otherwise unstructured texts, do not lead to interoperability.
>And from the latest version of the registration draft:
The document you refer to is the draft for the *mail* part of the
registry. The draft for the *news* part has not yet been written.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clerew.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5