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

[Charles Lindsey]

In <87sm2mi317.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

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

>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.

I am not convinced of that. It is certainly legitimate to use
charset=utf-8 in the body of an article (or in a part of a multipart) -
usually in conjunction with CTE 8bit. There is certainly no requirement to
normalize article bodies in any way (though it might be a requirement of
some particular application types).

So any requirement for stringprep (or any other -prep) could only arise
with texts generated by the server (e.g. in responses), and not in bodies
of articles passing in either direction.

But does the IETF actually require normalization of texts that are only
intended for human consumption? I would have thought not (though it might
be considered polite to use at least some minimal normalization). AFAIK,
there are currently no places in the document where any required content
of a respnse is in other than US-ASCII.

As I said yesterday, newsgroup-names are a matter for the format standards
to sort out (in the current Usefor they are still US-ASCII). There is also
the matter of the output of the LIST NEWSGROUPS command, but that again is
a matter for Usefor or its successors (since it is closely tied with the
checkgroups control message, which again is currently restricted to
ASCII).

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