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

[Russ Allbery]

Mark Crispin <MRC at CAC.Washington.EDU> writes:

> The following text on page 9:

>     The term "character" means a single Unicode code point and
>     implementations are not required to carry out normalisation.  Thus
>     U+0084 (A-dieresis) is one character while U+0041 U+0308 (A composed
>     with dieresis) is two; the two need not be treated as equivalent.

> is problematic and is unlikely to pass muster.

> Welcome to the wonderful world of stringprep.

I have just now (and I'm very sorry for having sat on this for a week) put
forward a question to our AD about the whole general issue of i18n and
character sets and how we should approach that at a high level, and will
report back his guidance on that.

I definitely agree that if the opaque blob approach we were trying to take
doesn't pass muster, this is another place where we're going to need to be
more specific.  I was hoping to avoid NNTP having to be the standard that
had to specify the stringprep for newsgroup names, just because that's
going to be a zoo to nail down and to some degree it's premature because
no one's really done the hard work on i18n newsgroup names yet.  But if we
have to, we have to.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>