[NNTP] Internationalisation, attempt 2

Charles Lindsey chl at clerew.man.ac.uk
Mon May 2 02:54:29 PDT 2005


In <20050429071819.GG42385 at finch-staff-1.thus.net> "Clive D.W. Feather" <clive at demon.net> writes:

>Okay, here's the second attempt.

>   Restricting newsgroup names to UTF-8 is not a complete solution.  In
>   particular, when new newsgroup names are created or a user is asked
>   to enter a newsgroup name, some form of canonicalisation will need to
>   take place.  This specification does not attempt to define that
>   canonicalization; servers are expected to match newsgroup names
>   octet-by-octet for the time being.  Further work is needed in this
>   area in conjunction with the article format specifications.

Not so sure about that "for the time being".

Surely the intent is that matching octet-by-octet should apply
_permanently_ (in any case, our draft proposes no other way of doing it).
Normalization is for clients to get right (or at most for the injecting
agent hiding behind the POST command to check and/or fix). If some
unnormalized newsgroup-name makes it through, then it will just fail to
match. Tough!

Not the similarity with the way we deal with message-ids. The comparison
is octet by octet, in spite of implications in RFC 2822 that
<ab.cd at example.com> is equivalent to <"ab.cd at example.com> (and which
USEFOR is dealing with.

BTW, if the draft still includes those examples on non-equivalent
message-ids, the latest version of them (following discovery of yet
another case needing to be covered) is:

|  <ab.cd at example.com>
|  <"ab.cd"@example.com>
|  <"ab.\cd"@example.com>

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