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From: duncan@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Duncan McEwan)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: CNews - now a pedantic software! :-(
Message-ID: <1991Apr04.221130.19697@comp.vuw.ac.nz>
Date: 4 Apr 91 22:11:30 GMT
References: <27F63B37.CFD@tct.com> <1991Apr02.183535.13886@buster.stafford.tx.us> <1991Apr03.042907.16938@buster.stafford.tx.us>
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In article <1991Apr03.042907.16938@buster.stafford.tx.us> rli@buster.stafford.tx.us writes:

>Well, it has been pointed out to me that the date header in
>Chip's articles were valid when they left his site, but had
>apparantly been munged by some other site before reaching buster.

The header may not have been munged at all -- some news readers (trn for
instance) converts the date header to local time and prints it in ctime
format for display only (I only noticed this after following this thread for
a while and wondering why *everyones* "Date:" headers seemed to be in illegal
ctime format :-)

However, as a previous poster pointed out, a basic philosophy in implementing
rfc's has always been (paraphrased) "be liberal in what you accept,
conservative in what you generate".  Unless there is a real technical reason
why you shouldn't accept an illegal header, why do you want to reject it?  In
this case, you could justify rejecting illegal date formats because they make
it harder for software to do things like converting dates to local time, or
attempting to order articles by posting date.  But a missing space after a
":" shouldn't cause anyone major problems (If someone can point out to me a
reason why it does cause problems, then I will most likely change my mind :-)

Duncan