[ietf-nntp] Further syntax

[Russ Allbery]

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

> 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.

You read the bytes off of the network with read(), inspect them, and if
you can't make sense of them, you replace the ones that don't make any
sense with "X" or something and then display the article.

I think that any client author can figure this out on their own.  Dealing
with non-printable characters is something that clients have to worry
about anyway; this is just a special case of that.

> 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."

I don't really care about the wording, but I do think that we shouldn't
let this hold up last call.  Either one is fine; it's just a stylistic
choice about how to word this as far as I'm concerned.  I'm happy to let
Clive pick unless he feels he needs more input.

> 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)?

They're a violation of a SHOULD, which means something slightly different
than what you say, I think.

> 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)?

I believe that Clive is changing the syntax.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>