ietf-822
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: RFC 2047 and gatewaying

2002-12-24 12:10:33

Bruce Lilly <blilly(_at_)erols(_dot_)com> writes:

Another major difference between Usefor draft "headers" and Internet
text message headers is that the former may include semicolon delimited
parameters for some fields (e.g. Date) where the syntax and ABNF for the
corresponding Internet text message header field do not permit such a
construct.

I believe this is being removed.

And there are some relatively minor differences, such as the difference
between the delimiter marking the end of a header field tag (the single
character ':' in Internet text messages vs. the two-character string ": "
in Usefor "headers").

You'll find that this difference is also present in RFC 1036, so if you
feel that's sufficient to make news headers not RFC 2822 headers, that was
already the case as of RFC 1036.

You'll also find that RFC 1036 restricted the format of the From header
relative to RFC 822 (although not particularly clearly or formally).

Not necessarily; it may be one of the newfangled Usefor "headers" and
the "gateway" may be one operating according to the current
specification which does not define such a "header".  Or it may be an
experimental "header", the syntax of which is only known to those
participating in the experiment [in email, such expermental headers
would begin with "X-", but current practice in Usenet articles appears
to be to make up some tag without consideration of collisions with
existing standards (e.g. Supersedes)].

*sigh*  We already have this discussion about Supersedes.  Widespread use
of the Supersedes header in news predates any standardization of the
header in e-mail by something on the order of eight years.

In any event, there is widespread feeling on the USEFOR list that failure
to provide for Unicode newsgroup names would basically make the entire
effort of producing a new standard pointless, and all of the solutions
seem to have significant problems.  There seems to be a consensus that
using raw UTF-8 in the Newsgroups header for Usenet articles is the least
bad choice.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)             
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>