[NNTP] Re: New NNTP drafts approaching IETF Last Call

[Mark Crispin]

On Mon, 14 Mar 2005, Russ Allbery wrote:
> This section is covering multiline responses, which are used (among other
> things) for conveying the actual article.  While no one uses those
> character sets for *commands*, they are all valid character sets to use in
> a MIME object, which is why this comes up.

I doubt that any news articles are (or will ever be) posted in UTF-16, 
UTF-32, UCS-2, or UCS-4, but I'll let that pass.

> We can't require any specific character set be used for
> all Usenet news articles since news articles are simply MIME messages and
> MIME allows the use of a variety of different character sets.  I don't
> think it would be the correct choice to try to force all Usenet news
> articles into UTF-8.

OK, that was not clear.

I think that you need to do two things here:
  1) Clarify that, as of this specification, all command responses are
     UTF-8.  Death to all ISO 8859-x, Shift-JIS, etc. responses.
  2) have some wording such as what section 4.3.1 in IMAP has, e.g.
 	Article texts MAY contain 8-bit or multi-octet characters,
 	but SHOULD do so when the [CHARSET] is identified via
 	[MIME-IMB] and/or [MIME-HDRS].
     [CHARSET] being a tag for RFC 2978 (or successor)
     [MIME-IMB] being a tag for RFC 2045 (or successor)
     [MIME-HDRS] being a tag for RFC 2047 (or successor).

That leaves the deplorable practice of "just send 8-bits" for headers 
instead of using [MIME-HDRS].  We need a very strong SHOULD here that 
it should be UTF-8 and/or [MIME-HDRS] compliant for server responses, and 
a MUST for client postings (that is, a client which complies with this 
specification MUST either use UTF-8 or [MIME-HDRS]).

This is adequate weasel-wording for old software while setting a good 
future direction.

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.