INTERNET-DRAFT                               Charles H. Lindsey
Usenet Format Working Group                  University of Manchester
                                             July 2001

4.2.5. Undesirable Headers

4.2.5.  Undesirable Headers
   A header whose content is empty is said to be an empty header.
   Relaying and reading agents SHOULD NOT consider presence or absence
   of an empty header to alter the semantics of an article (although
   syntactic rules, such as requirements that certain header names
   appear at most once in an article, MUST still be satisfied). Posting
   and injecting agents SHOULD delete empty headers from articles before
   posting them; relaying agents MUST pass them untouched.


   Headers that merely state defaults explicitly (e.g., a Followup-To
   header with the same content as the Newsgroups header, or a MIME
   Content-Type header with contents "text/plain; charset=us-ascii") or
   state information that reading agents can typically determine easily
   themselves (e.g.  the length of the body in octets) are redundant and
   posters and posting agents Ought Not to include them.

Diffs to previous draft

--- {draft-04}	Wed Jul 11 21:55:11 2001
+++ {draft-05}	Wed Jul 11 21:55:11 2001
@@ -7,8 +7,9 @@
    and injecting agents SHOULD delete empty headers from articles before
    posting them; relaying agents MUST pass them untouched.
 
+
    Headers that merely state defaults explicitly (e.g., a Followup-To
-   header with the same content as the Newsgroups header, or a Mime
+   header with the same content as the Newsgroups header, or a MIME
    Content-Type header with contents "text/plain; charset=us-ascii") or
    state information that reading agents can typically determine easily
    themselves (e.g.  the length of the body in octets) are redundant and