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

[Russ Allbery]

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

> The text uses such terms as "letter" and "digit" apparently presupposing
> the ASCII meanings of these terms, for example, in 3.3.1 we have "a
> capability line can only begin with a letter."

> Since this protocol is specified to use UTF-8, that is no longer
> adequate. If you wish to restrict to the codepoints used by ASCII for
> Latin letters, you need to say that explicitly.  The same for digits.

We do have a general statement in 2 that all keywords must be US-ASCII,
and the ABNF and the text say that a capability label is a keyword (and
also specifies keywords as ABNF).  I'm not sure if the additional clarity
is worh reiterating the definition of a keyword from the previous section
in the description of a capability label, but I agree that putting
"US-ASCII" before the word "letter" at the end of 3.3.1 is simple and adds
clarity.

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