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Re: Fwd: I-D ACTION:draft-klyne-msghdr-registry-02.txt

2002-02-10 15:06:44

In <200202081859(_dot_)g18Ixga11764(_at_)gti(_dot_)grillo(_dot_)net> Dan Grillo 
<Dan_Grillo(_at_)grillo(_dot_)net> writes:

Trying to return to a more polite tone:  notice this email has a Versions:
header, used by a set of mail tools I've been using on the Internet since
1990.

Interesting. It seems to be in direct competition with X-Mailer and
User-Agent. All these are all loose in the "wild", though User-Agent has
the advantage that is is already standarised for HTTP, and hopefully soon
will be for Netnews.

And we are going to have the same problem with the various X-Priority and
Precedence headers.


As an email implementor, I'd like to see a list that says:

What's standard (ie, defined in an RFC, like Subject)
What's non-standard but exists (like my Versions header)

Yes, the register needs to recognise that there are some headers out in
the wild (even widely used, some of them) which are nevertheless to be
deprecated on the grounds that some other, more-or-less equivalent, header
is going to be the one standardised. Do these headers remain in the
"provisional" register for ever? Or do they get entered in the "full"
register with a deprecated flag against them?

Ideally, I suppose, the RFC that standardizes the "official" version
should, at the same time, deprecate the others. Perhaps Graham could make
provision for such a flag in the "full" register.

In fact, we have a situation of this sort in Usefor. There are currently a
variety of NNTP-Posting-[Host,Date,Account] headers and other tracing
headers such as X-Trace. We plan to create one single Injector-Info header
(and I have already seen that in the wild too) to encompass the lot. So
the old ones (which were never documented anywhere anyway) will be
deprecated and, hopefully, will fade away (though I still expect to see
them in the wild for quite some time yet).

-- 
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
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