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

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Russ Allbery said:
> 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,

Since I was reading it for other reasons, can I please point at RFC 2821,
section 2.3.1:

    The SMTP content is sent in the SMTP DATA protocol unit and has two
    parts:  the headers and the body.  If the content conforms to other
    contemporary standards, the headers form a collection of field/value
    pairs structured as in the message format specification [32]; the
    body, if structured, is defined according to MIME [12].

(where [32] is RFC 2822).  This is the paradigm we've been following -
we're writing the transport protocol, and Usefor is writing the message
format specification. The message format has the sub-structure of headers
plus body, but we don't restrict the body.

More specifically, our article format definition says:
    header names: ASCII printable except colon;
    header values: MUST accept 33-255 unstructured,
                   SHOULD only generate UTF-8;
    body: any octets other than NUL, CR, and LF not in CRLF pairs.

> 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.

*I* did a load of hard work in i18n newsgroup names a few years ago. I
don't know what has survived, because I left Usefor soon after, but one
thing that was clear was that people aren't willing to do normalisation
every time an article or newsgroup name wanders past. The best model was
for there to be a canonical form for newsgroup names, for the newgroup
message to enforce that form, and for everyone else to assume it had
already been done. So LIST ACTIVE, for example, would only return canonical
names.

> But if we
> have to, we have to.

Do we have another 19 years?

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather  | Work:  <clive at demon.net>   | Tel:    +44 20 8495 6138
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