In <2IMY8L/ArRgOxOoJxITtsQ(_dot_)md5(_at_)libertango(_dot_)oryx(_dot_)com> Arnt
Gulbrandsen <arnt(_at_)gulbrandsen(_dot_)priv(_dot_)no> writes:
Martin Duerst writes:
As said in other mails, the way we use these headers, it's mostly
humans rather than email programs using them. Is there something in
the email specs (e.g. RFC 2822 or so) that would forbid such headers?
No, although...
I believe that as a rule of thumb, it's bad to go against the grain of a
design. In theory it can be sensible and right, but generally it turns
out to be a bad idea eventually. And in mail, the header fields that
are meant for direct human consumption are generally unstructured (ie.
they use the 'unstructured' production in RFC2822). The ones that
aren't unstructured are generally meant to be parsed.
It's not as simple as that. Some fields may be _primarily_ for human
consumption, and it may well be that no general-purpose MUA would ever
process them, but individual users might well write scripts to do cool
things with them, in which case they will want to relay on some
predictable format.
So how about a script to search my emails for some keyword, and to return
the URL from that Archive-At header of the matching messages, ready to
paste into some new document?
--
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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