usefor-article-09 February 2003

4.3.1.  Body Format Issues

   The body of an article SHOULD NOT be empty. A posting or injecting
   agent which does not reject such an article entirely SHOULD at least
   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: Some existing news software is known to react badly to
        body-less articles, hence the request for posting and injecting
        agents to insert a body in such cases. The sentence "This
        article was probably generated by a buggy news reader" has
        traditionally been used in this situation.

   Note that an article body is a sequence of lines terminated by CRLFs,
   not arbitrary binary data, and in particular it MUST end with a CRLF.
   However, relaying and serving agents SHOULD treat the body of an
   article as an uninterpreted sequence of octets (except as mandated by
   changes of CRLF representation and by control message processing, as
   in 7.2.4) and SHOULD avoid imposing constraints on it. See also
   section 4.5.

   Posters SHOULD avoid using control characters and escape sequences
   except for tab (US-ASCII 9), formfeed (US-ASCII 12) and, possibly,
   backspace (US-ASCII 8).  Tab signifies sufficient horizontal white
   space to reach the next of a set of fixed positions; posters are
   warned that there is no standard set of positions, so tabs should be
   avoided if precise spacing is essential. Formfeed (which is sometimes
   referred to as the "spoiler character") signifies a point at which a
   reading agent Ought to pause and await reader interaction before
   displaying further text.

        NOTE: Passing other control characters or escape sequences
        unaltered to a display or printing device is likely to have
        unpredictable results, except in the case of a device adapted to
        the special needs of some particular character set.

        NOTE: Backspace was historically used for underlining, done by
        an underscore (US-ASCII 95), a backspace, and a character,
        repeated for each character that should be underlined. Posters
        are warned that underlining is not available on all output
        devices or supported by all reading agents and is best not
        relied on for essential meaning.

--- ../usefor-article-08/Body_Format_Issues.out          August 2002
+++ ../usefor-article-09/Body_Format_Issues.out          February 2003