> Personally, I'd like to see a standard set of headers, one required
> (Archive-name:) and a standard for the set of "*.answers" approved
> optional auxiliary headers. FAQ maintainers could still add additional
> headers as is done today but there would be only one way to represent
> optional headers Posting-Frequency:, Last-modified:, Version:, URL:,
> Copyright and Maintainer:. Again, I am not talking about the content
> (although that would be nice ;-)) I'm talking about the headers.
>
> FYI: I have updated rkive and article to support the *.answers documented
> auxiliary headers. I'm sorry but I will not be supporting all the
> permutations listed below....
I think your FYI constitutes fair warning that your software will only
recognize the names documented in the *.answers guidelines.
We already suggest the specific headers "Posting-Frequency:",
"Last-modified:", "Version:", and "URL:" in the guidelines. Unless we
were to make them non-optional, which is almost out of the question,
or to outlaw any auxillary headers other than what we list and "X-"
headers, which is also a bit extreme, I don't see much we can do to
further "enforce" compliance with these header names.
I suppose we could encourage compliance by explicitly mentioning that
rkive and other software may know to attempt to specially handle the
optional headers which we list, and hence FAQ maintainers should
consider not using arbitary variations on these themes without
compelling reason, but that if they have other themes, they could
continue to create new auxillary headers for them as they saw fit.
Maybe we could add Copyright: and Maintainer: as new optional
auxillary header lines, too. As long as we don't have to come up with
consensus on what their format must be, they seem pretty reasonable.
Lastly, your enumeration of different ways of representing this and
that seems a little bit unfair in that it seems to count different
capitalizations as different. Auxillary headers are parsed loosely as
if they were RFC821 headers. Most mail readers are case-insensitive
with respect to header names.
-- Ping Huang <pshuang@mit.edu>; more info: http://web.mit.edu/pshuang/.plan Disclaimer: unless explicitly otherwise stated, my statements represent my personal viewpoints only.
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