usefor-usefor-04 May 2005

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2.2  Headers

   All headers in a news article are compliant with [RFC2822], however
   this specification is less permissive in what can be generated and
   accepted by news agents.  The syntax allowed for news articles is a
   strict subset of the "Internet Message Format", making all messages
   compliant with this specification inherently compliant with
   [RFC2822].  Note however that the converse is not guaranteed to be
   true in all cases.

   General rules which apply to all headers (even those documented in
   [RFC2822] and [RFC2045]) are listed below and those that apply to
   specific headers are described in the relevent sections of this
   document.

   o  All agents MUST generate headers so that at least one space
      immediately follows the ':' separating the header name and the
      header contents (for compatibility with deployed software).  News
      agents MAY accept headers which do not contain the required space.

   o  The header contents of every header line (including the first and
      any that are subsequently folded) MUST contain at least one non-
      whitespace character.

         NOTE: This means that no header content defined by or
         referenced by this document can be empty.  As a result, this
         document updates the <unstructured> construct from Section
         3.2.6 of [RFC2822] as follows:

   unstructured    =  1*( [FWS] utext ) [FWS]

   o  Compliant software MUST NOT generate (but MAY accept) headers of
      more than 998 octets.  This is the only limit on the length of a
      header line prescribed by this standard.  However, specific rules
      to the contrary may apply in particular cases (for example,
      according to [RFC2047] header lines containing encoded-words are
      limited to 76 octets).  [USEAGE] includes suggested limits for
      convenience of display by user agents.

         NOTE: There is NO restriction on the number of lines into which
         a header may be split, and hence there is NO restriction on the
         total length of a header (in particular it may, by suitable
         folding, be made to exceed the 998 octets restriction
         pertaining to a single header line).

   o  The character set for headers is US-ASCII.  Where the use of non-
      ASCII characters is required, they MUST be encoded using the MIME
      mechanisms defined in [RFC2047] and [RFC2231].
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#Diff to first older
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usefor-usefor April 2005
usefor-usefor November 2004
News Article Format and Transmission May 2004
News Article Format and Transmission November 2003
News Article Format June 2003
News Article Format April 2003
News Article Format February 2003
News Article Format August 2002
News Article Format May 2002
News Article Format November 2001
News Article Format July 2001
News Article Format April 2001
News Article Format February 2000
Son of 1036 June 1994

--- ../usefor-usefor-03/Headers.out          April 2005
+++ ../usefor-usefor-04/Headers.out          May 2005


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