On Tue, 18 Jan 2005, Laird Breyer wrote:
A "header line" as you propose is not a semantic unit, since folding
white space can break the information at all sorts of places, and as
the mail winds its way to its destination, folded lines can be
rearranged several times in semantically equivalent ways.
If people start using header lines in this sense, I think there's the
inbuilt potential for confusion in some types of discussion.
To me, it's more natural to associate "header line" with the fully unfolded
piece of the header which begins with a field name and colon, since such
a "header line" is invariant under mail transport (as much as possible).
It would be nice if you give direction on what to use in documents.
Personally I've used simply "header" most of the time and sometimes more
formal "header line" where as when referencing all headers I use "headers"
or "headers data". I typically do not differentiate as to if header has one
or more then one line in the message or refer to any specific line because
any header can have more one line but it does not change that it is still
one header that could be represented by one single line if its all folded
together (where as two different headers could not).
And I do believe believe "header" and "headers" are what majority who talk
about email (and don't write RFCs) use nowdays.
--
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net