From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Tue Jul 03 2001 - 13:26:55 CDT
Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
> But generally speaking mail readers have a bad reputation when used as
> news readers,
See, I don't understand where you're coming from when you say things like
this. *confused look* Do we just have very different Usenet experiences
or something?
I mean, *I* use a mail reader that also does news, or a news reader that
also does mail, and it's widely considered to be the best available news
reader on a feature by feature basis.
*Pine* has a bad reputation when used as a news reader, but Pine is hardly
the be-all and end-all of mail readers. The problems are almost entirely
specific to Pine.
> so we are asking genuine news readers to try a little harder.
Hey, I'm trying to save you work here! *grin*
I understand your point of view; I just really strongly disagree with it.
I think it makes things more complex for implementors without any real
gain, and it unnecessarily limits Usenet (particularly in the area of
gatewaying, which is a personal interest of mine, but also in the area of
other MIME types that people are going to add without worrying about
Usenet's ideosyncratic and unnecessary restrictions).
> And all we are asking them to do is to detect cases where 8bit encoding
> can be used.
This, to me, falls into the category of things that are best handled by
the GNKSA.
> It is a decision making process. Once the decision is made, all the
> existing machinery in the reader can then be used without change to
> implement whichever encoding was decided upon.
Except where our restrictions break things we don't even know about, like
multipart/signed. I'm quite certain that's not going to be the only case
like that, and I'm also quite certain that we won't find them all before
we publish, if we ever publish.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>