Sorry for resurrecting an old thread, but I came up with another reason
for allowing list owners to make portions of the list header invisible
to unauthorized persons (in addition to all the other reasons people
mentioned at the time--a few months ago, I think).  This occurred to me
when I was searching on CataList
(http://www.lsoft.com/lists/listref.html) for my lists.

I have set up several lists for an organization, which include some for
internal use (which are confidential), and some for general subscription
(which are non-confidential).  Since all these lists have the same
owners, I've set up an access control list which, for obvious reasons,
is certainly confidential.  The owners of all lists (including the
non-confidential ones) are set to
                Owner= Owner(ACCESS-L)
(I have a reason for doing it this way, rather than Owner= (ACCESS-L),
but the problem exists either way.)

The problem, of course, is that the existence of ACCESS-L (an invented
name for this example) is no longer confidential as intended since it
shows up on the Owner= line of all the non-confidential lists.

The best (IMHO) syntax suggestion for this was from someone who
proposed:

* ... Various list headers here
* ... All of which are public
* Hide= On
* ... All headers in between (and inclusive of) the Hide=On
* ... and Hide=Off lines will be hidden and not included in
* ... any catalogs, nor made available with a REVIEW, and
* ... basically only available to list owners doing a GET.
* Hide= Off
* ... Back to non-hidden headers

The list name and list title would not be hideable, but everything else
would be (a blurb could tell people that listname-request@fqdn would
reach the list owners, so there is no need for Owner= to be
non-hideable).

I hope L-Soft will reconsider and add this feature; for some reason,
Eric seemed reluctant to at the time.

Shahrukh
--
Shahrukh Merchant