[ietf-nntp] draft-hoffman-rfc1738bis-02.txt

Charles Lindsey chl at clerew.man.ac.uk
Thu Apr 22 04:39:14 PDT 2004


In <87r7uhkx28.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>Charles Lindsey <chl at clerew.man.ac.uk> writes:

>> all of which bears no resemblance to what is done in practice, or to
>> anything that might work. Somebody needs to contact Paul about this (but
>> probably not me - perhaps Russ).

>What about this bears no resemblence to what is done in practice?

Well we discussed this briefly when the previous draft of this came out,
and I think it was said then that the 'news' scheme and the 'nntp' scheme
were not/should not be identical. Anyway, here is the syntax as I posted
it yesterday:

A news URL takes one of two forms:

   newsURL      =  scheme ":" [ news-server ] [ refbygroup | message ]
   scheme       =  "news" | "nntp"
   news-server  =  "//" server "/"
   refbygroup   = group [ "/" messageno [ "-" messageno ] ]
   messageno    = local-part "@" domain

A <group> is a period-delimited hierarchical name, such as
"comp.infosystems.www.misc". A <messageno> corresponds to the
Message-ID of section 2.1.5 of RFC 1036, without the enclosing "<"
and ">"; it takes the form <unique>@<full_domain_name>.  A message
identifier may be distinguished from a news group name by the
presence of the commercial at "@" character. No additional characters
are reserved within the components of a news URL.

Things wrong with that:

1. No syntax for <message> is given
2. I suspect that the syntax for <messageno> should have been just
1*DIGIT, since it is evidently to be used in the same way that <range> is
used in our NNTP draft.
3. I suspect that the syntax given for <messageno> was actually intended
to be the syntax for <message>. However, if that was intended to represent
a syntax for message-id, then it differs from the syntax for message-id
given in RFC 2822 and in RFC 1036 and in Usefor, which does not seem
particularly useful.
4. If the refbygroup form is used, then the news-server MUST be present.
5. I am not clear as to the present usage of "nntp" as a scheme name, but
for sure I have never encountered a URL of the form
<news://news.foo.example/comp.foo/1234-1238> (it is certainly not
envisaged by RFC 1738).

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl at clerew.man.ac.uk      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
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