terminology

On Mon January 17 2005 18:58, Laird Breyer wrote:
> 
> On Jan 18 2005, Charles Lindsey wrote:
> 
> > In <[email protected]> Keith Moore <[email protected]> writes:
> > 
> > >OTOH, "header line" seems ambiguous to me - I think you must mean 
> > >something _besides_ header field because you're not using either 
> > >"header field" or the common abbreviation "header".  :)
> > 
> > I think we need the term "header line" when speaking of the individual
> > lines of a header field that has been folded.
> > 
> 
> A "header line" as you propose is not a semantic unit, since folding
> white space can break the information at all sorts of places, and as
> the mail winds its way to its destination, folded lines can be
> rearranged several times in semantically equivalent ways.

Correct.

> If people start using header lines in this sense, I think there's the
> inbuilt potential for confusion in some types of discussion.

It has been used precisely that way for quite a long time; in
this case Charles is correct.
 
> To me, it's more natural to associate "header line" with the fully unfolded
> piece of the header which begins with a field name and colon, since such
> a "header line" is invariant under mail transport (as much as possible).

No, that's a "header field".