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

[Clive D.W. Feather]

[Longer message coming, but in the meantime.]

Mark Crispin said:
> 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.

Well of course not, because those character sets don't conform to the
requirements on CR/LF/NUL.

> 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.

If by "command responses" you mean the initial response line, then 3.1 is
perfectly clear:

   The character set for all NNTP commands is UTF-8 [RFC3629].

and the ABNF confirms it.

>  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].
[...]

This is a Usefor issue, not an NNTP issue.

> We need a very strong SHOULD here that 
> it should be UTF-8 and/or [MIME-HDRS] compliant for server responses,

We're talking about material transferred over Usenet. There is no way to
enforce it. The wording was written that way for very good reason.

> and 
> a MUST for client postings (that is, a client which complies with this 
> specification MUST either use UTF-8 or [MIME-HDRS]).

This "must" will be completely and utterly ignored.

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

This isn't "old software", it's the entire world. The current news article
standard isn't MIME- or UTF-8 conformant, and vast areas of the world use
ISO 8859-n BECAUSE IT'S THE RIGHT THING.

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather  | Work:  <clive at demon.net>   | Tel:    +44 20 8495 6138
Internet Expert     | Home:  <clive at davros.org>  | Fax:    +44 870 051 9937
Demon Internet      | WWW: http://www.davros.org | Mobile: +44 7973 377646
Thus plc            |                            |