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

Charles Lindsey chl at clerew.man.ac.uk
Fri Mar 25 04:44:19 PST 2005


In <87hdj0x3c9.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>It's not clear to me that this would be something about which we have a
>choice.  In following the IETF WG chairs mailing list and some of the
>other IETF policy mailing lists, i18n and character set issues appear to
>be matters that have increasingly been nailed down by i18n-specific
>working groups and applied IETF-wide to all protocols.  Individual
>protocol working groups are getting less and less leeway in this area and
>are being strongly encouraged to simply reuse the efforts of the i18n
>experts, due to the wealth of complex and difficult issues involved in
>handling this properly and securely.  (I am generally in favor of this
>trend.)

My understanding is that i18n-specific working groups which need to
specify normalization restrictions on UTF-8 SHOULD do so by writing
documents in the style of stringprep, and moreover they SHOULD make use of
one of the already-defined *-prep documents unless there is a good eason
to invent yet-another-one.

But there is no requirement that every UTF-8 text permitted by every
standard must be subject to such normalization, like it or not; it depends
on the use to which that text is to be put (e.g. in newsgroup-names,
domain-names, etc.).

So I think the most that is required in our draft (except for those cases
arising in responses and commands, which Clive has alraeady analyzed for
us in some detail) is to point out that is it likely that the format
standards for the articles to be transported will have limited some of the
UTF-8 that that may be encountered by means of assorted *-prep filters.

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