ietf-nntp HDR parameter proposal

Jeffrey M. Vinocur jeff at litech.org
Wed Mar 19 20:28:44 PST 2003


On Wed, 19 Mar 2003, Russ Allbery wrote:

>     HDR
>     HDR BASE
>     HDR BASE EXTRA
>     HDR ALL
> 
> HDR BASE indicates that HDR is supported for the base overview headers
> Subject, From, Date, Message-ID, and References and the metadata items
> :bytes and :lines.  HDR ALL indicates that HDR is supported for all
> headers.  HDR BASE EXTRA indicates that HDR is supported for all of the
> headers included in HDR BASE plus some additional headers (not specified),
> but not for all headers.

I think it will be useful for some clients (but can be ignored by those
that don't wish the complexity), requires minimal programming and
configuration effort for server coder and admin, and uses minimal 
bandwidth.

Perhaps HDR BASE EXTRA could be simplified to HDR EXTRA?  Might make 
parsing marginally easier.
 

> One problem is that HDR BASE indicates that Xref is *not* in the HDR
> database, when it's nearly universally included in overview and therefore
> probably is.  On the other hand, HDR BASE EXTRA just because one is
> including Xref may not be a good idea.  We could just add Xref to the base
> HDR headers, but I kind of hate to do that when it's not part of the base
> OVER headers.

Potentially we could add a fifth possibility (here HDR BASE XREF seems 
like a more intuitive name than HDR XREF, I have to admit) for this case.  


-- 
Jeffrey M. Vinocur
jeff at litech.org




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