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

[Charles Lindsey]

In <Pine.WNT.4.63.0503241118340.1900 at Shimo-Tomobiki.panda.com> Mark Crispin <MRC at CAC.Washington.EDU> writes:

>Second, it doesn't work to punt a question to Usefor when Usefor has 
>nothing to say on the matter.  We are talking about responses to the HDR 
>and OVER commands in NNTP, not message headers.

But Usefor has a lot to say on the matter. And the HDR and OVER commands
in NNTP are simply required to take whatever is in the headers of the
articles and to deliver it as-is (subject to some specified mangling in
the case of OVER). So yes, "as-is" had better be in UTF-8, but the draft
is written so that anything with at least ASCII as a subset is acceptable,
and will do no harm at least within the NNTP protocol.

>The only way that you can do this is to establish an explicit requirement 
>for Usefor to establish a means to declare the character set of 8-bit 
>characters in HDR and OVER responses in NNTP.  If that is not in Usefor's 
>charter, then you must convince Usefor to accept that as a work item.

It is no part of the function of this WG to instruct the Usefor WG as to
what it should do.

What the Usefor WG has done, in its current drafts, to to limit headers to
be in US-ASCII (which may include things encoded according to RFC 2047, of
course). It also imposes some requirements on the transport mechanisms
(notably that they be 8-bit clean), so as to preserve the greatest scope
for future extensions (and the current NNTP draft is entirely consistent
with those requirements, as indeed are all known implementations of news
transport mechanisms).

The Usefor WG is also charged with introducing I18N as an Experimental
Protocol, but only after it has finished work on the base standards. So
I18N is off topic on the Usefor WG for now, but it will come, and it will
have to take account of the sort of issues you have been raising.

>I offered you an easy way out; to use SHOULD to establish UTF-8 as a goal 
>state but allow other character sets in legacy uses.

It already is established as a goal state, but it is in the nature of
transports that they should be liberal.


>What are these "national or regional authorities"?  In particular, is 
>there *any* national or regional government which has passed a law that 
>says "newsgroups are to be in KOI-8"?

Such national or regional authorities undoubtedly exist. They are
established by the consensus of the administrators of servers worldwide
who choose to acknowledge their authority (because they prefer a quiet
life, and so it in in their interest to do so). But the process of
establishing them is a political and social matter not governable by any
standard. It is an adhocratic anarchy, and it works remarkably well.

Usefor acknowledges that the exist, and provides tools for them to use and
conventions for them to follow, but it very carefully does not say how
they come to be established. Maybe some informational document will
explain it all some day.

>> Finally there is HELP. This is unstructured text designed to match
>> purely local needs. Currently it's like an article body - any octets
>> allowed except NUL, CR, and LF not in CRLF pairs. It normally gets dumped
>> from a file on the server or some similar approach. Any change in
>> requirements is going to be widely ignored.

>I don't see how a "I don't want to fix it, so I refuse to allow it to be 
>fixed" attitude is at all helpful.

There is nothing to fix. Like everywhere else in the document, the default
charset is UTF-8, but the sky will not fall in if some implementation
chooses to use something else. However, I tend to agree that there should
be a statement somewhere that these informational texts (the initial
greeting is another example) SHOULD be interpreted as UTF-8 texts.

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