On Mon, 12 Dec 2022, Alexey Melnikov wrote:
the associated semantics are clearly spelled out; reference the definitions of the MIXER and Netnews "Expires:" header field; and indicate that the new header field is intended to subsume and replace them.
It doesn't replace the MIXER field, it's the same as the MIXER field. It does not affect netnews at all, and I don't understand why anyone would imagine that it does. There are lots of headers that are different between mail and news, and gateways deal with it. (I've certainly written enough of them.)
Or, if there really are reasons to preserve "Expires:" in this document despite the risks of possible confusion, at least clearly state those in the document and warn against possible misinterpretations of intent.
As I understand it, the argument here is that somwehere there are Expires headers with contents similar enough to timestamps that they can be confused with them, but that mean something different enough that interpreting them as "no longer valid" would break something. Since RFC 2156 was published in 1998, either these messages are more than 25 years old, or they knew that their use conflicts with a standards track RFC and they didn't care. The Expires: header in 1998 replaced the Expiry-Date: header in RFC 1327 from 1992, so if there was some conflict at the time, they also didn't care.
As far as I know nobody has any examples of these rogue Expires, and I am having a lot of trouble seeing what would make them a problem now.
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