ietf-nntp Collected minor issues

[Charles Lindsey]

In <yly93elcox.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>OVERALL

>  I think "netnews" is better than "net news".

That is the Usefor usage, and it is usually capitalized.

>4.1. Wildmat syntax

>  The note at the end of this section is basically fine, but I'll nitpick
>  the wording a little.  There is fairly standard practice for backslash
>  and brackets, but they're not universally implemented.  Maybe something
>  more like:

>    Note: the characters \, [, and ] are not allowed in wildmats, while *
>    and ? are always wildcards.  There is no need for a * or ? character
>    that is not a wildcard in this specification since within it wildmats
>    are only used on newsgroup names.  Backslash is commonly used to
>    suppress the special meaning of characters and brackets to introduce
>    sets, but this usage is not universal and interpretation of these
>    characters in the context of UTF-8 strings is potentially complex and
>    different from existing practice, so they were omitted from this
>    specification.  A future extention to this specification may provide
>    semantics for these characters.

Indeed so. The use of [...] requires agreement on the collating order. If
it is US-ASCII (or you are in the C locale, which amounts to the same
thing) then all is straightforward.

But if, in UTF-8, you ask for everything in between 'LATIN CAPITAL LETTER
A' and 'GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA' you will get all sorts of weird and
wonderful things. So writing that future extension would be a non-trivial
task.

>7.3.1.2. Description (POST)

>  To address Charles's comment, it may be worthwhile to add a note to the
>  last paragraph saying:

>    Reusing the same message-id is preferred since articles may not always
>    be made available for reading immediately (for example, they may have
>    to go through a moderation process first).

Yes.

>8.3.2. Description (NEWGROUPS)

>  Yes, the response from NEWGROUPS includes the high, low, and status
>  information.  The examples should be fixed.  (At least, that's what INN
>  does; if that isn't what we should standardize, people should speak up
>  now.)

>  Add to the end of the first paragraph:

>    Clients SHOULD use four-digit years.  Two-digit years are supported
>    only for backward compatibility.

Does anyhone still use two-digit years since Y2K happened?

>8.6.5.2. Description (LIST NEWSGROUPS)

>  The newsgroups file is normally tab-delimited.  Change "by one or more
>  US-ASCII space characters" to "by one or more US-ASCII space or tab
>  characters."

One could go even further and mandate TABs, or at least SHOULD be TABs.

>10.6.1.2. Description (HDR)

>  The reference to RFC 1036 here should be omitted (just drop that
>  sentence).  There are lots of interesting headers that aren't defined in
>  RFC 1036.

I agree.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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