Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: CNews - now a pedantic software! : -(
Message-ID: <1991Apr4.063315.20892@zoo.toronto.edu>
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1991 06:33:15 GMT
References: <3NIP9ZB@methan.chemie.fu-berlin.de> <27F63B37.CFD@tct.com> <1991Apr02.183535.13886@buster.stafford.tx.us> <1991Apr03.042907.16938@buster.stafford.tx.us> <1991Apr03.230016.8369@looking.on.ca>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <1991Apr03.230016.8369@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes:
>However, I do encourage that the standard be changed so that:
>
>	^Header:$
>
>is a valid null header.   Requiring ^Header: $ is wasteful and doesn't
>make a lot of sense.  Is this and 822ism or a 1036ism?

It's a 1036ism, and might possibly have been an accident.  Actually, my
own feeling is that null headers simply ought to be outlawed, as a silly
waste of bytes, but I don't suppose people will go for that...  The current
inews does eliminate them.

Unfortunately, the people with broken software who are yelling hardest
about colon-space are the ones with non-empty headers without the space.

>For things that are clearly the fault of the site, you bounce back to
>usenet@sender-site...

I am inclined to be sympathetic to the poor naive sysadmins who don't
have the time or expertise to fix their broken software and don't want
to be bombarded with a hundred messages an hour -- especially over
expensive long-distance phone calls -- telling them to fix it.  If
there were some way of pointing the messages at the authors of the
software, now *that* would be different.
-- 
"The stories one hears about putting up | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
SunOS 4.1.1 are all true."  -D. Harrison|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry