ietf-nntp NNTP base spec comments

Chris Newman Chris.Newman at INNOSOFT.COM
Tue Nov 17 15:06:35 PST 1998


I was skimming the base spec (draft-ietf-nntpext-base-06.txt) and came up
with a few issues:

Is it possible to use "C:" and "S:" as RFC 977 did and most other RFCs do,
instead of [C] and [S] in examples.

Is it possible to drop the 10-space indent so the draft looks more like
traditional RFC format, including RFC 977.

I notice that RFC 977 has lots of examples and this draft has almost none.
Any chance of including some examples?

Where is the ABNF for server responses?  This seems especially important
for structured responses like the LIST EXTENSIONS response.

I'm not sure the current Security Considerations section is adequate.
At least discussing security issues related to "POST" -- specifically, the
news administrator may be held responsible by other news admins for 
tracing abuse of the POST command from his site.

ABNF issues: 

Is it really necessary to permit trailing whitespace _after_ commands?  Do
any clients generate this?  It doesn't seem to add any value to the
protocol. 

The syntax for UTF-8-non-ascii is overly permissive.  The following is
less permissive:
     UTF-8-non-ascii = UTF8-2 / UTF8-3 / UTF8-4 / UTF8-5 / UTF8-6
     UTF8-1          = %x80-BF
     UTF8-2          = %xC0-DF UTF8-1
     UTF8-3          = %xE0-EF 2UTF8-1
     UTF8-4          = %xF0-F7 3UTF8-1
     UTF8-5          = %xF8-FB 4UTF8-1
     UTF8-6          = %xFC-FD 5UTF8-1

		- Chris





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