usefor-article-03 February 2000

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 SHOULD NOT include them.

--- ../s-o-1036/Undesirable_Headers.out          June 1994
+++ ../usefor-article-03/Undesirable_Headers.out          February 2000
@@ -1,46 +1,17 @@
-4.2.2. Undesirable Headers
+4.2.5.  Undesirable Headers
 
-A header whose content is empty  is  said  to  be  an  empty
-header.   Relayers  and  reading  agents SHOULD not consider
-presence or absence of an empty header to alter  the  seman-
-tics  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 agents
-SHOULD delete empty headers  from  articles  before  posting
-them.
-
-INTERNET DRAFT to be        NEWS                  sec. 4.2.2
-
-
-Headers  that merely state defaults explicitly (e.g., a Fol-
-lowup-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,  con-
-veying no information whatsoever.  Headers that state infor-
-mation which cannot possibly be of use to a significant num-
-ber  of relayers, reading agents, or readers (e.g., the name
-of the software package used as the posting agent) are  use-
-less and pointless.  Posters and posting agents SHOULD avoid
-including redundant or useless headers in articles.
-
-     NOTE: Information that someone,  somewhere,  might
-     someday  find useful is best omitted from headers.
-     (There's quite enough of it  in  article  bodies.)
-     Headers  should contain information of known util-
-     ity only.  This is not meant to preclude inclusion
-     of  information  primarily meant for news-software
-     debugging, but such information should be included
-     only  if there is real reason, preferably based on
-     experience, to suspect that it  may  be  genuinely
-     useful.  Articles passing through gateways are the
-     only obvious case  where  inclusion  of  debugging
-     information appears clearly legitimate.  (See sec-
-     tion 10.1.)
-
-     NOTE: A useful rule of thumb for  software  imple-
-     mentors  is:  "if  I had to pay a dollar a day for
-     the transmission of this  header,  would  I  still
-     think it worthwhile?".
+   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 SHOULD NOT include them.