usefor-article-11 June 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.

--- ../usefor-article-10/Body_Format_Issues.out          April 2003
+++ ../usefor-article-11/Body_Format_Issues.out          June 2003
@@ -19,26 +19,4 @@
    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.