[NNTP] Future-proofing for including capabilities in responses

Richard Clayton richard at highwayman.com
Tue Mar 29 08:22:54 PST 2005


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In message <20050329125605.GR89808 at finch-staff-1.thus.net>, Clive D.W.
Feather <clive at demon.net> writes

>Charles Lindsey said:
>> I don't like the idea of a text which, even viewed in a UTF-8 reader with
>> full capabilities, contains an invisible character which has semantic
>> meaning.
>[...]
>> And I like even less the idea of breaking the already-extablished UTF-8
>> standard.
>
>In both cases we're looking for a delimiter for *machine* parsing - humans
>would not normally be examining this text, so why does it matter?

because sometimes humans DO look at the text, for example when things
are broken and they're checking out what really happens with telnet (or
whatever)   that's why IETF protocols are "readable" and aren't just
full of magic byte values to mean  "ARTICLE" or "GROUP" or whatever

>And we're not breaking the UTF-8 standard, we're using an octet sequence
>which is *not* UTF-8 to indicate, well, that what follows is not just UTF-8
>text.

you're breaking an important principle of ability-to-debug ... and
that's not something to discard lightly :(

- -- 
richard                                              Richard Clayton

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.         Benjamin Franklin

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