[NNTP] NNTP URI draft

[Russ Allbery]

This was mentioned previously here, but there has also been a request
(from several months ago -- I'm really behind, and I'm sorry about that)
for us to look at this draft more formally.  The goal is to retire RFC
1738, which requires pulling out all of the bits of it that the IETF wants
to keep so that the document can be obsoleted.

Anyway, this draft documents the news URI and deprecates the nntp URI.
You can see it at:

  <http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-hoffman-news-nntp-uri-04.txt>

It is an individual submission; we may be asked to adopt it if we want to
make a lot of changes.  (I'm not sure that we have the bandwidth for that,
but I'm also not sure that many changes are needed.)

The document is pretty simple.  The two points that I personally noted
might need review are:

 * Do we want to document URIs for referring to particular news
   hierarchies, like:

       <news:comp.*>
       <news:rec.arts.comics.*>

   lynx at least does support them and has for some time.  Right now, the
   document only includes what's in RFC 1738, namely a reference to a
   specific newsgroup (with or without a server), a specific message ID,
   or <news:*> referring to all newsgroups.

   I presume that if we do want to support the above, we don't want to
   try to allow full wildmat syntax in a URI and instead would limit it
   to just representing hierarchies.

 * The draft tries to deal with some of the message ID complications, but
   I wonder if we don't have better information in our new base draft.
   (Since this is an NNTP URI, not a Usenet URI, I expect it should
   satisfy the NNTP message ID requirements, not the more stringent
   Usenet Format message ID requirements.)  Perhaps the right thing to
   do here is to ask this document to wait for the new NNTP document to
   be published and then reference our message ID definition?

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