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"william(at)elan.net" <william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net> writes:
On Mon, 17 Jan 2005, Charles Lindsey wrote:
I think that registry is intended for fields that agents might be expected
to recognize and act upon. I doubt any MUA is going to have a
built-in-recognition of any and all fields beginning with "Original-".
Surely they are intended for human consumption, in which case using
"X-Original-xxxxxx" would he just as good, and would break no rules or
regisries?
Aren't trace fields like "Received:" intended for human consumption too? :)
ALL headers need to be readable by humans upon occasions. But some are not
really suitable for reading by other than humans.
And in this case, while its primarily trace data for humans for debugging
it could potentially be used by MTAs, for example to detect complex mail
loop. Besides that some systems might choose to display "Original-Sender"
or "Original-From" in MUA as well (on part with Sender, From, Resent-From,
Resent-Sender when showing the entities involved in email transmission).
Well any header that is intended to be used by MTAs needs to be
standardized in its own right. What I am doubting is whether any MTA is
ever going to be programmed to take some generic action on Original-Foo:
headers for all possible values of "Foo".
And its not exactly that it would "break" the registry rule, its just
that currently there is no way to do it and I think that means we'd
have to expand IANA header registry to allow to define certain set of
headers with common prefix or to specifically reserve "prefix" for
use with one type of headers (which are afterward specifically defined).
That generally means either separate draft for IANA or expansion of
RFC3864 (but I really would prefer header prefix registry by on same page
at IANA as specific header names registry).
Well if you want to embark upon an enhancement to RFC3834, then I would
suggest some preliminary discussion with Graham Klyne.
--
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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