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

4.3.2. Body Conventions

4.3.2.  Body Conventions
   A body is by default an uninterpreted sequence of octets for most of
   the purposes of this standard. However, a MIME Content-Type header
   may impose some structure or intended interpretation upon it, and may
   also specify the character set in accordance with which the octets
   are to be interpreted.

   It is a common practice for followup agents to enable the
   incorporation of the followed-up article (the "precursor") as a
   quotation. This SHOULD be done by prefacing each line of the quoted
   text (even if it is empty) with the character ">" (or perhaps with
   "> " in the case of a previously unquoted line). This will result in
   multiple levels of ">" when quoted content itself contains quoted
   content, and it will also facilitate the automatic analysis of
   articles.

        NOTE: Posters should edit quoted context to trim it down to the
        minimum necessary. However, followup agents Ought Not to attempt
        to enforce this beyond issuing a warning (past attempts to do so
        have been found to be notably counter-productive).

   The followup agent SHOULD also precede the quoted content by an
   "attribution line" (however, readers are warned not to assume that
   they are accurate, especially within multiply nested quotations). The
   following convention for such lines, whilst not mandated by this
   standard, is intended to facilitate their automatic recognition and
   processing by sophisticated reading agents. The attribution SHOULD
   contain the name or the email address of the precursor's poster, as
   in
      Joe D. Bloggs  wrote:
   or
      Helmut Schmidt  schrieb:

   The attribution MAY contain also a single Newsgroup name (the one
   from which the followup is being made), the precursor's Message-ID
   and/or the precursor's Date and Time. Any of these that are present,
   SHOULD precede the name and/or email address. However, the inclusion
   or not of such fields Ought always to be under the control of the
   poster.

   To enable this line, and the Message-ID and the Email address within
   it, to be recognised (for example to enable suitable reading agents
   to retrieve the precursor or email its poster by clicking on them),
   the following conventions SHOULD be observed:
     o The precursor's Message-ID SHOULD be enclosed within <...> or
       
     o The precursor's poster's Email address SHOULD be enclosed within
       <...>
     o The various fields may be separated by arbitrary text and they
       may be folded in the same way as headers, but attributions SHOULD
       always be terminated by a ":" followed by CRLF.

   Further examples:

      On comp.foo in <1234@bar.example> on 24 Dec 1997 16:40:20 +0000,
         Joe D. Bloggs  wrote:

      Am 24. Dez 1997 schrieb Helmut Schmidt :

   A "personal signature" is a short closing text automatically added to
   the end of articles by posting agents, identifying the poster and
   giving his network addresses, etc. If a poster or posting agent does
   append such a signature to an article, it MUST be preceded with a
   delimiter line containing (only) two hyphens (US-ASCII 45) followed
   by one SP (US-ASCII 32). The signature is considered to extend from
   the last occurrence of that delimiter up to the end of the article
   (or up to the end of the part in the case of a multipart MIME body).
   Followup agents, when incorporating quoted text from a precursor,
   Ought Not to include the signature in the quotation. Posting agents
   Ought to discourage (at least with a warning) signatures of excessive
   length (4 lines is a commonly accepted limit).

Diffs to previous draft

--- {draft-04}	Wed Jul 11 21:55:14 2001
+++ {draft-05}	Wed Jul 11 21:55:15 2001
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 
4.3.2.  Body Conventions
    A body is by default an uninterpreted sequence of octets for most of
-   the purposes of this standard. However, a Mime Content-Type header
+   the purposes of this standard. However, a MIME Content-Type header
    may impose some structure or intended interpretation upon it, and may
    also specify the character set in accordance with which the octets
    are to be interpreted.
@@ -61,10 +61,10 @@
    the end of articles by posting agents, identifying the poster and
    giving his network addresses, etc. If a poster or posting agent does
    append such a signature to an article, it MUST be preceded with a
-   delimiter line containing (only) two hyphens (ASCII 45) followed by
-   one SP (ASCII 32). The signature is considered to extend from the
-   last occurrence of that delimiter up to the end of the article (or up
-   to the end of the part in the case of a multipart Mime body).
+   delimiter line containing (only) two hyphens (US-ASCII 45) followed
+   by one SP (US-ASCII 32). The signature is considered to extend from
+   the last occurrence of that delimiter up to the end of the article
+   (or up to the end of the part in the case of a multipart MIME body).
    Followup agents, when incorporating quoted text from a precursor,
    Ought Not to include the signature in the quotation. Posting agents
    Ought to discourage (at least with a warning) signatures of excessive