[NNTP] NNTP URI draft

[Kai Henningsen]

rra at stanford.edu (Russ Allbery)  wrote on 08.03.05 in <87r7ip6aiy.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu>:

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

> >>> 2.1  The newsURI contains an <article>
>
> >>>    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 MUST be the message identifier of an actual Netnews
> >>>    article
>
> >> Bad use of MUST.  Referring to a non-existent article is not a
> >> violation of the standard.  As you've worded it right now, a client
> >> would need to ensure through some other means that the article it's
> >> asking for actually exists before using a news URI referencing it.
>
> > Hmmmm! It is really a requirement to be observed by users
>
> Then it's even more absurd.  :)
>
> > I was trying to avoid arguments about the syntactic form of a message
> > identifier, and this seemed a simple way of saying "it MUST be a valid
> > message-id" without needing to say what "valid" actually meant. Would
> > you settle for "SHOULD"?
>
> No, because again, using a nonexistent message ID is not a protocol
> violation any more than sending an NNTP command "ARTICLE <id>" where <id>
> doesn't correspond to an existing article is a protocol violation.  I
> think you're confusing protocol violations with normal errors.

I think this points out a generic problem with the draft. It's not precise  
enough about what it all means.

What the text SHOULD do, in my opinion. is, for every possible URI,  
specify what sequence of NNTP commands it is supposed to cause, and what  
the result is supposed to be, as much as possible. (Don't the http and ftp  
schemes do that?)

So, for example, news:bla at foo can be explained as causing ARTICLE blaa at foo  
and returning the text returned by that command, if any, or an error  
indication if that command returns one.

Done like that, a lot of the semantic can be punted to the NNTP standard -  
you do not need to care with what is a valid message id, or what happens  
when there is no article for that message id, because the NNTP standard  
already does - you just create inputs to NNTP and report outputs.

That is, IMHO, what an URI spec should be like.

MfG Kai