ietf-nntp My notes from the NNTP WG meeting at the 37th IETF

[Jack De Winter]

>The defacto standards (INN + Cnews/Reference NNTP implementation) transport
>8-bit article bodies unmolested.  I see no reason to continue to enforce
>this _unnecessary_ archaism which has already been purposefully abandoned.
>
>We don't need to deal with charsets - NNTP is a transport mechanism, and
>isn't involved in display issues.  The only place where it matters is in
>the headers - where we may simply wish to take a similar bailout as,
>say, Posix C did, and insist that the headers are, say, UTF8 (where can
>I find a listing of this?) or Latin-1.  Indeed, we may well be able
>to get away with insisting that the keywords are the current ASCII
>encodings, and most of/all of the keyword values are 8-bit.

We are not talking about defacto standards though.  If NNTP uses an
eight bit channel (there is no mention in the specs of what the width
of the channel is) then we have to worry about header ordering, and
other stuff.  MIME encapsulation is okay for the body, but 8 bit headers
where the header order and thus any indication of the charset to use
for the headers, needs to be considered carefully.

While it may be outside the scope, it may also be considered an omission
in the original specification.  I personally would like to know the width
of the channel and what the default charsets (and how to specify others)
is.  I think that this minimum discussion should be included in 977bis
to clarify, even if it says that it will be addressed later.

regards,
Jack
-------------------------------------------------
Jack De Winter - Wildbear Consulting, Inc.
(519) 576-3873		http://www.wildbear.on.ca/

Author of SLMail(95/NT) (http://www.seattlelab.com/) and other great products.