From: Kai Henningsen (kaih@khms.westfalen.de)
Date: Tue Nov 04 1997 - 14:41:00 CST
chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk (Charles Lindsey) wrote on 03.11.97 in <9711031027.AA01495@clw.cs.man.ac.uk>:
> kaih@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen) wrote:
>
> >OTOH, I don't think there really is any technical justification left even
> >for this rule. Limit total newsgroup name length to 255, and leave it at
> >that, would be my preferred solution.
>
> No, you can't do that, because a line in the newsgroups file is already
> expected to fit within 79 characters.
That's not a technical limit. It's only a convention (and a doubtful one
at that).
> >As for allowed characters, it might make sense to forbid all-numeric
> >components, as those make problems for a lot of existing implementations
> >(like C-News and INN), plus all those fixed strings that have been used
> >differently.
>
> Yes, I could change the syntax to:
>
> Newsgroups-content = newsgroup-name *( ng-delim newsgroup-name
> ) newsgroup-name = *FWS component *( "." component ) *FWS
> component = component-start *13component-rest
> component-start = lowercase
> lowercase = <all letters not designated as
There's this lowercase stuff again. IMHO, it has no place in the standard.
> However, there already exists a whole family of alt.2600.* groups (quite
> active I believe). Also
> alt.266
> alt.atari.2600
> alt.collecting.8-track-tapes
> alt.comedy.slapstick.3-stooges
> alt.music.311alt.music.4-track
> alt.religion.christian.20-something
None of these has all-numeric components :-)
> alt.svens.house.of.12.year-old.lust
> alt.tv.90210
> Do we want to outlaw all those? Henry allowed them.
Well, all I said was that there _is_ a technical argument for outlawing
them. Wether we actually need to, I don't know - no software I'd write
would be inconvenienced by this.
> >Anything else should only be cases of obvious potential for
> >harm, which essentially reduces to some specific ASCII characters like
> >":%/&*?" (exact set TBD, but think "URL syntax" and "special shell
> >characters". No non-ASCII characters should be on that list, and certainly
> >not ASCII upper case. Leave that to hierarchy-specific rules.
>
> No, the last thing we want is ugly punctuation in the middle of newsgroup
The standard shouldn't dictate aesthetics.
MfG Kai