[NNTP] Re: New NNTP drafts approaching IETF Last Call

[Mark Crispin]

On Tue, 15 Mar 2005, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
>> Furthermore, the second sentence, while obviously intended to maintain
>> compatibility with the past, is short-sighted and will lead to
>> compatibility problems forever.
> It's consistent with the real world, however.

There's a difference between what you write in a "compatibility with the 
past" document and what you write in a protocol specification document.

>>    Note: implementations prior to this specification used octets other
>>    than CR, NUL, and LF arbitrarily; the character set of any octets
>>    greater than 128 is indeterminate with old servers.  Server
>>    implementations which comply with this specification (and thus
>>    advertise VERSION 2 in CAPABILITIES) MUST send UTF-8 strings in
>>    responses exclusively; and client implementations MUST treat any
>>    response string from a server which advertises VERSION 2 as being
>>    in UTF-8.
> Sorry, but this is just unacceptable to me.
> Firstly, the NNTP specification is written to pass around very generic
> "articles"

You are mixing message contents with responses, and saying "we can't fix 
responses because responses are used to contain message contents."

The entire problem is that you're not separating the two.

> Secondly, there is no way that your proposal is going to work. Suppose that
> I upgrade my server to talk NNTPv2. You are going to require me to convert
> *EVERY* article body received to UTF-8?

Eventually, yes.

> That completely breaks the spirit
> of Usenet and probably the wording of Usefor/RFC1036.

It's time to break it.  It can't happen today, or tommorrow, but maybe it 
will happen and be done in 5 years if we start now.

> I've just run an analysis of around 64,000 articles that arrived on our
> news server today.

This simply proves the need to roll up sleeves and establish standards for 
the future.

The difference between your approach and mine is that you're saying "it's 
broken, so it can't be fixed ever" whereas I'm saying "it's broken, let's 
start saying that we are fixing it, and here is the fix, and eventually 
the fix will go from being a tiny minority to the mainstream."

> That says there's a long way to go in the adoption of UTF-8, and the right
> place to start is in Usefor, not NNTP. For the same reason that it's RFC
> 2822, not 2821, that deals with email content.

You're overlooking the IMAP precedent.  IMAP has done everything that I 
advocated, and did it a decade ago.

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.