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

[Russ Allbery]

Charles Lindsey <chl at clerew.man.ac.uk> writes:

> No, stringprep is for implementing the idea of "early normalization", as
> espoused by Martin Duerst and the Unicode people. He who generates a
> UTF-8 string that may have to be recognized by software is responsible
> for normalizing. He who transports it can then assume it is normalized
> and is not obliged to confirm the normalization (at much expense) en
> route. If the generator of the string screws up, then "garbage in,
> garbage out" applies.

Please note that this is not, as I understand it, an accurate
representation of the IETF stance on stringprep.  If we were starting from
scratch today with NNTP as a new protocol, I don't think there would even
be any useful discussion about whether or not we would have to deal with
stringprep.  It would be a requirement.

The only reason why we may be able to avoid dealing with this is because
of the stage of the process and the desire to get something out there to
replace RFC 977 which is hopelessly obsolete.

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