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

[Charles Lindsey]

In <Pine.WNT.4.63.0503221643290.5332 at Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU> Mark Crispin <MRC at CAC.Washington.EDU> writes:

>On Tue, 15 Mar 2005, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:

>> That completely breaks the spirit
>> of Usenet and probably the wording of Usefor/RFC1036.

>It's time to break it.  It can't happen today, or tommorrow, but maybe it 
>will happen and be done in 5 years if we start now.

>> I've just run an analysis of around 64,000 articles that arrived on our
>> news server today.

>This simply proves the need to roll up sleeves and establish standards for 
>the future.

No, the matter of what may occur in a Usenet article is for the article
format standards. And yes, there are issues to address there. But the NNTP
standard is not the place to specify article format, except in the
broadest terms. The function of NNTP is to transport articles reliably,
including everything defined by the current format standards, eveything
that can be foreseen as likely in future format standards and, in the
interests of being liberal, anything else that is known to be around on
the existing network and which does not actually cause harm to the NNTP
process (if it causes harm further on down the chain, then that is not
NNTP's problem).

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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