ietf-nntp mixed-casing reference

[Charles Lindsey]

In <Pine.LNX.3.93.1000727211721.3044C-100000 at one.softml.net> Chin Chee-Kai <cheekai at SoftML.net> writes:


>Speaking of casing (following Charles' email), should we document
>the practice in some newservers of disregarding the newsgroup 
>casings?  I checked a deployed INN server v1.7.2 and found it 
>rejecting mixed casing.

>But it is used in my neighborhood ISP's new server, and it 
>accepts, for eg., "GROUP reC.HumoR.FUNNY" as reference to 
>"rec.humor.funny".  The server announces itself as "DNEWS".
>Anyone knows what this server type is?   

Yes, but although servers can easily turn uppercase ASCII into lowercase
ASCII, they cannot do it for UTF-8 characters in general (generally
speaking, servers will not understand all the inner horrors of UNICODE,
and you cannot in general do that conversion in full Unicode without a
huge table lookup). So that is why in USEFOR servers MAY try to do it if
they can, but they are no way required to do so. And that is the reason
why only lower-case names are officially allowed.

But that is all irrelevant for the NNTP standard, which sjhould just pass
across anything that _looks_ like a newsgroup name and let the server
worry about it.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Email:     chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk  Web:   http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
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