Subject: On Headers
From: keiya@sdf.org
Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2017 05:02:50 -0600

One of the main reasons I wrote my own phlogging system rather than using one
of the many that others have written is that I have a rather strongly-held odd
opinion: Blog posts, newsgroup posts, and email messages are all fundamentally
the same thing and should be treated as such. I figured if I'm going to think
something that odd, I'd best follow through.

It's a sensible position though. The fundamental unit of all three is the
'message'. A message is composed of headers and one or more body parts. The
headers encode data like who wrote it, when it was writen, and a headline for
the message. The body is usually mostly text, though in blog posts including
pictures and sound is far more common than the other two, mostly because HTML
is well-suited to including them by reference.

The primary difference is the distribution model. Anyone can insert a message
into an email box, but only the owner can read it. Newsgroups allow anyone to
post and anyone to read. Blogs allow anyone to read, but only one or a select
group of people can add posts. There are other possibilities, like private
blogs, priority mailboxes only certain people can send to, or closed mailing
lists, but those too only differ in the access controls.

I do have some disagreements with the message format that has carried forward
from the ARPAnet days: text should be wrapped by the recieving client because
only they can possibly know correct text metrics (Even in monospace! Is w̆ one
character or two?) and of course text should be (and fortunately usually is
now) UTF-8 by default. Even with these quibbles, it's still the most sensical
human-readable encoding of the relevant information I've see, so I use it.

~ Keiya