[NNTP] NNTP URI draft

[Charles Lindsey]

In <9SfEP55Xw-B at khms.westfalen.de> kaih at khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen) writes:


>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?)

No, you can't do that, because it is not obligatory (for the news scheme
at least) to use NNTP (though that will be the case 99% of the time). For
example, when used with the local server, it might access the active file
(whatever) directly. Moreover, even with an NNTP connection, it might
choose to access the newsgroups file or the overview rather than the
active file.

>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.

That is fine for those forms of the URI that return a single article. But
it is not so clear what is to happen to those forms that simply connect
you to the server and leave it to you what to do next. If it connects you
to a list of groups, is it then suppose to select one to read, or is it
supposed to invite you to select one to subscribe to, or will it depend
whether you are already subscribed? These are all things to be determined
by the local implementation, depending on what sort of news reader it
chooses to connect you to. The standard really shouldn't be caring about
that.

>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.

I don't think there is much semantic to be specified, and I think my
present text already goes as far as is justified.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133   Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl at clerew.man.ac.uk      Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9      Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5