s-o-1036 June 1994

4.3.1. Body Format Issues

The body of an article MAY be empty, although posting agents
SHOULD  consider this an error condition (meriting returning
the article to the poster for revision).   A  posting  agent
which does not reject such an article SHOULD issue a warning
message to the poster and supply  a  non-empty  body.   Note
that  the separator line MUST be present even if the body is
empty.

     NOTE: An empty body is  probably  a  poster  error
     except, arguably, for some control messages... and
     even they really ought to have a  body  explaining
     the  reason  for  the  control  message.  Some old
     reading agents are known to generate empty  bodies
     for  "cancel"  control messages, so posting agents
     might opt not to reject body-less articles in such
     cases  (although  it  would  be  better to fix the
     reading agents to request a body).  However,  some
     existing  news software is known to react badly to
     body-less articles, hence the request for  posting
     agents to insert a body in such cases.

INTERNET DRAFT to be        NEWS                  sec. 4.3.1


     NOTE:  A possible posting-agent-supplied body text
     (already used by one widespread posting agent)  is
     "This  article  was  probably generated by a buggy
     news reader.".  (The use of "reader" to  refer  to
     the  reading  agent  is traditional, although this
     Draft uses more precise terminology.)

     NOTE: The requirement for the separator line  even
     in  a bodyless article is inherited from MAIL, and
     also distinguishes legitimately-bodyless  articles
     from articles accidentally truncated in the middle
     of the headers.

Note that an article body is a sequence of lines  terminated
by  EOLs,  not  arbitrary  binary data, and in particular it
MUST end with an EOL.  However, relayers  SHOULD  treat  the
body  of  an  article as an uninterpreted sequence of octets
(except as mandated by changes of EOL representation and  by
control-message  processing)  and SHOULD avoid imposing con-
straints on it.  See also section 4.6.