ietf-822
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Re: New Internet Draft: draft-duerst-archived-at-00.txt

2004-10-29 08:08:42

Structured fields (as far as RFC 2822's definition of structured
vs. unstructured fields is concerned) are primarily used by
message handling programs (not only clients, but e.g. IMAP
servers, MTAs, Sieve filtering language (RFC 3028), etc.).
Fields intended to be used only by humans are generally
unstructured (again, in the RFC 2822 sense), e.g. Subject,
Comments, Content-Description.  

Yes, this _tends_ to be the case, because fields designed to be parsed
by computer programs need to be structured, while fields designed
primarily for human consumption have less need to be structured.
However it's not a rule, it's just the way things usually work.

In practice it's often the case that we want a field to be both
human readable and usable by computer programs.  I think that would
have been true for Archived-At even if we had started out with
the understanding that it was originally intended for human use.

Keith