Re: faq server rejects my posting

Chris Lewis (clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca)
Thu, 23 Feb 1995 01:17:50 -0500

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On Feb 22, 21:07, Jonathan Kamens wrote:
}I wrote:
} The second space after the colon is illegal according to RFC1036. Or, does
} that not apply to Summary lines?
}
} I can't find anything in RFC 1036 that explicitly states that colons
} must be followed by exactly one space.

} Yes, there are a couple of places where it says that "a blank" should
} follow the colon, but as far as I can tell, it never comes right out
} and says that *exactly* one blank must follow the colon.

Henry Spencer, before RFC1036bis effort (around '88 I'd guess) determined
that the vague language in RFC1036 *mandates* one and exactly only one
space after the colon in headers. Even if the header is *empty*,
there *must* be one blank after the colon, or the newsreader should
strip it. I was just wondering whether "Summary:" may have been
relaxed.

This is when it was also determined that there should be no spaces around
the commas in Newsgroups: lines, and that articles that violate it should
be dropped.

} Do you have specific text in the RFC in mind that I'm missing?

} I know of no News software that will reject postings because they have
} header fields with more than one space after the colon.

By specific text, I refer to Henry's work, and the fact that Cnews *does*
reject messages that flunk these rules. However, he may only be
doing this on the "important" headers like Path:, From:, Newsgroups:,
Date:, Message-Id:.

} Personally, I think it would be a bad thing to enforce a requirement of
} a exactly one space after the colon.

You obviously didn't see the flamewars when Henry turned up the pickiness
in C news ;-) Henry thought so too, but believed that the RFC left
him no choice.

RFC1036bis makes it clear.

} Bringing this back to the subject of FAQ maintenance.... Even if
} you're right that a Summary field with more than one space after the
} colon would be rejected by News software, I'm fairly certain that it
} would *not* be rejected by the FAQ server, and I wrote the FAQ server,
} so I should know :-). All the Perl code I've ever written to parse
} headers (and the FAQ server is written in Perl) uses \s+ after the
} colon.

As do my extensions to your spam detector ;-)

However, it probably would be a good idea to tighten up the FAQ server.
RFC1036bis is available on Henry's machine somewhere.

-- 
Chris Lewis: _Una confibula non sat est_
Phone: Canada 613 832-0541
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