[NNTP] AD guidance on NNTP i18n issues

Russ Allbery rra at stanford.edu
Mon Mar 28 15:59:23 PST 2005


I have conferred with our AD about the general question of how far we need
to go in resolving the various i18n issues around NNTP, and he had the
following guidance and help in interpreting the working group charter:

We must document that the issue exists, describe current practice, and
note that more work may need to be done.  It would be appropriate to put
this into a new "Internationalization Considerations" section.  However,
complete resolution is not part of our charter, and our charter
specifically tasks us with documenting the existing situation before
taking up new work.  Therefore, if changes to NNTP are required to address
internationalization issues, it's preferrable for us to defer that work
until our core work has been completed.

USEFOR is tasked in its charter with doing some of the
internationalization work.  If it can be done there, it should be.  If
not, USEFOR also needs to document that the issue exists and a new working
group may need to be formed specifically to deal with i18n issues around
Usenet and NNTP.

My interpretation of this guidance is:

 * Clive's changes recently posted to the list are good clarifications.
   Beyond that, the current permissive language around article content can
   stay, and we don't need to add stringprep or other canonicalization for
   newsgroup arguments.

 * We need to add an Internationalization Considerations section.  That
   section should spell out:

   o The current internationalization problems from an NNTP perspective,
     namely article data (including data taken from headers), newsgroup
     names, and LIST NEWSGROUPS output.

   o The current growing use of MIME for the article format, but also the
     substantial use of local character sets in article headers and (less
     commonly) untagged article bodies.

   o The mix of character sets used in newsgroup descriptions.

   o The current pure-ASCII convention for newsgroup names, which is
     widespread but not entirely universal.

   o The need, long-term, for standardization of character sets, tagging,
     and encoding for articles, for standardization on UTF-8 for newsgroup
     descriptions, and for standardization on UTF-8 and canonicalization
     of newsgroup names.  We should also clearly state that all of those
     issues require work done in conjunction with the article format
     standard.

 * We should strongly discourage any use of newsgroup names that would
   interfere with the long-term canonicalization goals, since that's the
   area where a bad choice may be hard to reverse later.  Personally, I'm
   leaning towards saying that newsgroup names SHOULD be US-ASCII for the
   time being (read: until a standard is in place specifying how to handle
   UTF-8 newsgroup names), just to put a significant warning in front of
   people that experimenting with UTF-8 may cause them interoperability
   problems later, while keeping the existing syntax that allows for
   UTF-8 down the road.

We need someone to write this section.  Clive, if you feel comfortable
doing so, you're probably in the best position to do so right now.  If
not, or if you need any help, please let me know and I'll try to find a
volunteer.

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



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