Re: Auxiliary Header surprises...

Kent Landfield (kent@landfield.com)
Sat, 28 Sep 1996 15:17:02 -0500 (CDT)

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In reply to: Ping Huang: "Re: Auxiliary Header surprises..."

#
# 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.
#

First off, I am not advocating anything of the sort. I pointed it out because
there were such a difference in the use of headers. Education can be a good
thing and that's what I was doing. I found something I had not expected. Like
I said, it was surprising.

# 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.

Yes! You can encourage authors when new FAQs are submitted by asking about
their use of auxiliary headers and assure those used fit the documented
ones. No reason to restrict them from creating new ones that suit their
specific needs.

# 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.

Seems that they are already used in some form to a great extent. They
should be added.

# 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.

;-) These are news headers but you are right, there is a dependence on the
message format documented in RFC 822. I can't remember the last time I
saw a from: or newsgroup: line in a valid 1036 formated news article...
While it might be acceptable, there is really no real reason why they
should be different. My software complies with RFC 1036/822 in that
regard but the point is still valid.

-- 
Kent Landfield                        Phone: 1-817-545-2502             
The Landfield Group                   FAX:   1-817-545-7650             
Email: kent@landfield.com             http://www.landfield.com/
Please send comp.sources.misc related mail to kent@uunet.uu.net.

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