ietf-nntp 7-bit restriction in command arguments

[David Johnson (Exchange)]

>From draft-barber-nntp-news-00.txt:
               Commands in the NNTP MUST consist of a case-insensitive
               keyword, which MAY be followed by one or more arguments.
               All commands MUST be terminated by a CRLF pair. Multiple
               commands MUST not be permitted on the same line. 
Keywords
               and arguments MUST consist of printable ASCII 
characters.

I know this restriction exists in RFC-977, but is it really necessary 
to continue limiting command arguments to ascii characters? It makes 
handling non-ascii character sets more difficult. The restriction in 
IMAP seems much more reasonable, where unencoded binary strings with 
NUL or excessive control characters must be encoded, but otherwise 
8-bit data is allowed. 

I also think this draft should specify how binary arguments are to be 
encoded (i.e., use a MIME content transfer encoding), to avoid a 
proliferation of different encodings as people define new extensions.

- David

-----------------
David C. Johnson   <djohnson at microsoft.com>
Program Manager
Microsoft Exchange Product Unit
Microsoft Corporation