[NNTP] Article references

[Charles Lindsey]

In <20050411210303.GB1299 at finch-staff-1.thus.net> "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> writes:

>Wording attempt two:

>I propose modifying section 6 as follows:

>   News reading clients have available a variety of mechanisms to
>   retrieve articles via NNTP.  The news articles are stored and indexed
>   using three types of keys.  One key is the message-id of an article.
>   Another key is composed of the newsgroup name and the article number
>   within that newsgroup.  That key MUST be unique to a particular
>   server (there will be only one article with that number within a
>   particular newsgroup), but is not required to be globally unique.
>   Additionally, because the same article can be cross-posted to
>   multiple newsgroups, there may be multiple keys that point to the
>-  same article on the same server.  The final key is the arrival
>+  same article on the same server; nevertheless, a given article
>+  MUST NOT have two different article numbers in any particular
>+  newsgroup on a particular server. The final key is the arrival
>   timestamp, giving the time that the article arrived at the server.

That still contains one problem for those who read the text with malicious
intent.

"there may be multiple keys that point to the same article on the same
server" might be taken as implying there might be two message-ids pointing
to the same article, whereas it is clear that "multiple keys" is only
intended to refer to keys of the second type.

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