[NNTP] NNTP URI draft

[Russ Allbery]

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

> How about

> s/It SHOULD be the message identifier
>  /It is intended to be the message identifier/?

I'm fine with that.

> What I am trying to indicate is that it is limited, in practical terms,
> to the format defined in RFC 1036 or whatever. So I now have:

>    A <message-id> corresponds to the <msg-id> of [RFC 2822] and to the
>    Message-ID of section 2.1.5 of [RFC 1036], but without the enclosing
>    "<" and ">". It is intended to be the message identifier of an actual
>    Netnews article and hence will in practice conform to the syntax
>    defined in [RFC 1036] or in any subsequent standard for Netnews
>    articles.

This looks great to me.

>> How about:

>>    The resource retrieved by this URI is the Netnews article with the
>>    given <message-id>.  Message identifiers are required to be globally
>>    unique, so the same article will be obtained whatever server is
>>    accessed for that purpose (provided the server in question has that
>>    article available).

> Yes, that's better. Would you buy s/will/should/?

Sure, sounds good.

>> Yeah, I thought about this some more and changed my mind, since after
>> all 1036 does define the format of the resource that one gets back.
>> Although it's not at all clear to me that this is the right reference
>> for newsgroup names in particular, since in practice the news URL can
>> be used with any NNTP-supported newsgroup name (which is a richer set
>> than RFC 1036).

> The syntax I have given for <newsgroup-name> is as in the NNTP
> draft. But it is like message-id - it won't work unless it conforms to
> 1036/whatever.  So it needs a similar wording to the message-id case.

>>>    The <newsgroup-name> SHOULD be that of an existing newsgroup,

> So it now says "The <newsgroup-name> is intended to be that of an existing
> newsgroup, ..."

Sounds good here as well.

> But does lynx also support <news:*.test>?

Yup.

> And do other systems support similar stuff?

I don't know, I don't have any other software installed right now that
supports URL syntax and supports Usenet.

> Well here is a quote from RFC 3986 (which is the umbrella for all URI
> schemes - I don't seem to have the actual HTTP spec to hand):

>    The syntax and semantics of URIs vary from scheme to scheme, as 
>    described by the defining specification for each scheme. 
>    Implementations may use scheme-specific rules, at further processing 
>    cost, to reduce the probability of false negatives.  For example, 
>    because the "http" scheme makes use of an authority component, has a 
>    default port of "80", and defines an empty path to be equivalent to 
>    "/", the following four URIs are equivalent: 
 
>       http://example.com 
>       http://example.com/ 
>       http://example.com:/ 
>       http://example.com:80/ 

Thanks!  That's authoritative as far as I'm concerned.

> But serving Netnews articles is its primary purpose (see 1st paragraph
> of the Introduction section of nntpext).

> How about:

>    The nntp URI scheme is used to retrieve individual articles
>    via the NNTP protocol [draft-ietf-nntpext-base-*.txt]. It is usually
>    (but not necessarily) used in connection with Netnews articles as
>    defined in [RFC 1036].

That sounds great!  Thank you.

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