[ietf-nntp] Further syntax

Charles Lindsey chl at clerew.man.ac.uk
Mon Mar 8 04:03:47 PST 2004


In <20040305180158.GN96586 at finch-staff-1.thus.net> "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> writes:

>+   The content of a header SHOULD be in UTF-8 and clients MUST only use
>+   UTF-8 in header contents. However, if a server receives an article
>+   from elsewhere that uses octets in the range 128 to 255 in some other
>+   manner, it MAY pass it to a client without modification. Therefore
>+   clients MUST be prepared to receive such headers and also data
>+   derived from them (e.g. in the responses from the OVER extension)
>+   and MUST NOT assume that they are always UTF-8.

I don't think you can say that "clients MUST be prepared to do X" (or even
SHOULD) unless you are in a position to tell them exactly how to go about
doing X.

Since, in the cases we are considering (and in the absence of some
extension of Netnews to make specific provision), all the client can do is
to "guess the charset".

Therefore, it would be much better to say something like:

    "In such cases, clients will have to interpret such headers as best
    they can, possibly relying on out of band information not provided by
    the protocol."

Is it not clear that non-UTF-8 headers are in violation of the standard,
but that they MAY be tolerated (essentially that the server need not waste
its time doing a check)?

If a non-UTF-8 header is *not* to be a violation of the standard, then we
have to get rid of all that syntax for UTF8-non-ascii (or has that syntax
already gone)?

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