ietf-nntp Re: nntp-extensions Character sets in draft-hernacki-nntpsrch-00

[Ben Polk]

At 02:47 PM 10/9/96 -0700, David Johnson (Exchange) wrote:

I've copied this message to ietf-nntp because the first item below 
talks about changes to the new NNTP RFC.

>> One exception defined by this RFC to the 7bit character set  restriction
>> for  commands in [NNTP-977] is that the 8bit ISO-8859-1 character set is
>> allowed in unencoded form in search strings.  This is allowed because it
>> simplifies  handling  this  widely used character set, without requiring
>> support of arbitrary binary data.
>
>This would be better addressed in Stan Barber's base specification, so a
>uniform method of encoding non-ascii arguments to commands is defined
>rather than potentially inventing a new encoding with each new
>extension. I have sent a separate e-mail to ietf-nntp on this issue.

I don't agree.  The base draft is intended to document current practice, 
plus provide a means for extensions.  Current practise is that all NNTP
commands and their arguments are 7 bit ASCII.  

Perhaps this extension to allow 8 bits in the search text should
be recast into a more general extension that allows 8 bit data
in all NNTP commands and arguments?

>I disagree with the following restriction in the draft:
>
>> LIST SEARCHES
>> 
>> Returns a list of strings that define which newgroups are being indexed
>> by the news server and are thus available for searching.  In addition,
>> the character sets allowed for each group is returned.

The language in the document wasn't clear.  The intent is to restrict
the character set of the queries.  I will clarify this.

>Restricting newsgroups to "allow" only certain character sets is a
>mistake. This is both unenforceable and unnecessary. All that is needed
>is to specify the character set of the search criteria. If the server
>does not support that character set then an error response should be
>returned.

I agree with all this. 

Thanks for your commends David.

Ben Polk
Netscape News Server Engineering