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

Mark Crispin MRC at CAC.Washington.EDU
Mon Mar 14 17:53:48 PST 2005


On Mon, 14 Mar 2005, Russ Allbery wrote:
>>   1) Clarify that, as of this specification, all command responses are
>>      UTF-8.  Death to all ISO 8859-x, Shift-JIS, etc. responses.
> Here's the practical problem:  Some of the command responses (such as OVER
> and HDR in particular) are article headers.  Usenet in practice has a
> significant "just send 8-bits" culture in some hierarchies

Those are "article texts", and thus are covered in point 2:

>>   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].

The "SHOULD" in this article is adequate weasel-wording; it states the 
principle while allowing leeway for legacy.

> We were kind of hoping to bail on questions of article format by treating
> NNTP as a transport mechanism that hands back an article as an opaque wad
> of data and leaving the fights over character sets to the article format.

In response, I can say that IMAP wasn't allowed to bail on such questions 
(I tried...).  So the precedent is there, and it's not in your favor.

Fortunately, the "bail" option isn't lost; it just requires more wording.

-- Mark --

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



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