Re: Proposed resolution of issue 101: relationship between header and body blocks

My apologies if this was discussed further after I dropped off the call 
yesterday: as Doug says, there are two related questions:

1) are body block(s) in any way philosophically distinct from header 
blocks?
2) either way, is more than one body block allowed, and if so what are the 
processing rules?

On the conference call a little over a week ago, there seemed to be a 
fairly clear consensus on indicating that in some way or other, headers 
are for extension functions, and body block(s) are somehow distinct.  This 
represented a change in my own thinking, but we had strong input that in 
practice, implementations need to treat the two very differently.  If 
they're going to be treated differently, then it seems to me that we must 
indeed signal in the specification what those differences are intended to 
be.  I was asked to draft text representing that point of view.

Like Doug, I believe this is nearly orthogonal to the question of whether 
there can be more than one such body entry.  So, it is possible to 
consider a body that carries, for example, two requests for stock quotes, 
each of which is considered to be a "main purpose of the message"; 
contrast these with a potential header entry indicating "results of 
requests may be cached".

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Noah Mendelsohn                                    Voice: 1-617-693-4036
Lotus Development Corp.                            Fax: 1-617-693-8676
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
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Received on Thursday, 15 November 2001 09:54:22 UTC