Network Working Group G. Klyne
Request for Comments: 3864 Nine by Nine
BCP: 90 M. Nottingham
Category: Best Current Practice BEA
J. Mogul
HP Labs
September 2004
Registration Procedures for Message Header Fields
Status of this Memo
This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the
Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
improvements. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004).
Abstract
This specification defines registration procedures for the message
header fields used by Internet mail, HTTP, Netnews and other
applications.
Klyne, et al. Best Current Practice [Page 1]
RFC 3864 Header Field Registration September 2004
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1. Structure of this Document . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2. Document Terminology and Conventions . . . . . . . . . . 4
2. Message Header Fields. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.1. Permanent and Provisional Header Fields. . . . . . . . . 4
2.2. Definitions of Message Header Fields . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.2.1. Application-specific Message Header Fields. . . . 5
2.2.2. MIME Header Fields. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3. Registry Usage Requirements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4. Registration Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4.1. Header Field Specification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.2. Registration Templates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.2.1. Permanent Message Header Field Registration
Template. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4.2.2. Provisional Message Header Field Submission
Template. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.3. Submission of Registration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
4.4. Objections to Registration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
4.5. Change Control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
4.6. Comments on Header Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
4.7. Location of Header Field Registry. . . . . . . . . . . . 12
5. IANA Considerations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
6. Security Considerations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
7. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
8. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
8.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
8.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
9. Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
10. Full Copyright Statement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
1. Introduction
This specification defines registration procedures for the message
header field names used by Internet mail, HTTP, newsgroup feeds and
other Internet applications. It is not intended to be a replacement
for protocol-specific registries, such as the SIP registry [30].
Benefits of a central registry for message header field names
include:
o providing a single point of reference for standardized and
widely-used header field names;
o providing a central point of discovery for established header
fields, and easy location of their defining documents;
Klyne, et al. Best Current Practice [Page 2]
RFC 3864 Header Field Registration September 2004
o discouraging multiple definitions of a header field name for
different purposes;
o helping those proposing new header fields discern established
trends and conventions, and avoid names that might be confused
with existing ones;
o encouraging convergence of header field name usage across multiple
applications and protocols.
The primary specification for Internet message header fields in email
is the Internet mail message format specification, RFC 2822 [4].
HTTP/1.0 [10] and HTTP/1.1 [24] define message header fields
(respectively, the HTTP-header and message-header protocol elements)
for use with HTTP. RFC 1036 [5] defines message header elements for
use with Netnews feeds. These specifications also define a number of
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