7.3.3 Compact Form

SIP provides a mechanism to represent common header field names in an abbreviated form. This may be useful when messages would otherwise become too large to be carried on the transport available to it (exceeding the maximum transmission unit (MTU) when using UDP, for example). These compact forms are defined in Section 20. A compact form MAY be substituted for the longer form of a header field name at any time without changing the semantics of the message. A header field name MAY appear in both long and short forms within the same message. Implementations MUST accept both the long and short forms of each header name.