From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Jul 23 2002 - 04:34:04 CDT
In <Xns9252F7FA79Egrahamdrabblelineone@ID-77355.user.dfncis.de> Graham Drabble <graham.drabble@lineone.net> writes:
>On 19 Jul 2002 "Charles Lindsey" <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> wrote in
>news:GzIE3G.2Mt@clw.cs.man.ac.uk:
>> In duties of Injecting Agents:
>>
>> 4. It MUST reject any article that does not have the correct
>> mandatory headers for a proto-article (5 and 8.2.1)
>> present, or which contains any header that does not have
>> legal contents, and it SHOULD reject any article which
>> contains any header deprecated for Netnews (4.2.1). In
>> particular, it MUST reject any article whose
>> Newsgroups-header or Followup-To-header contains an
>> encoded newsgroup-name (5.5.2) although it MAY instead
>> decode those newsgroup-names and continue (this being a
>> useful service for moderators using that injecting agent,
>> see 8.7).
>Can you have a MUST ... OR ? It seems contradictory.
OK, the word "alternatively" at the right place might be clearer. Also I
have taken Henry's point, and altered the order of things a little so that
the antecedent of "In particular" is clearer.
4. It MUST reject any article that does not have the correct
mandatory headers for a proto-article (5 and 8.2.1) present, or
which contains any header that does not have legal contents. In
particular, it MUST reject any article whose Newsgroups-header
or Followup-To-header contains an encoded newsgroup-name
(5.5.2); alternatively, it MAY decode those newsgroup-names and
continue (this being a useful service for moderators using that
injecting agent, see 8.7). It SHOULD reject any article which
contains any header deprecated for Netnews (4.2.1).
>> Does anyone want to upgrade that MAY to a SHOULD?
Apparently noone does, so far.
>>
>> 5. Otherwise, he causes the article to be injected, having
>> first
>> decoded any encoded newgroup-name (5.5.2), unless his
>> injecting offers that service (8.2.2), and having observed
> ^^^
> agent
Oops!
>>
>> Articles will be received by the moderator either encapsulated
>> as an object of Content-Type application/news-transmission
>> (8.2.2) (or possibly encapsulated but without an explicit
>> Content-Type-header), or else directly as an email already
>> containing all the headers appropriate for a Netnews article
>> (see 8.2.2) in which case he needs to be aware of the Duties of
>> an Incoming Gateway (8.8.2) (and, in particular, he SHOULD
>> adopt the Message-ID- and Date-headers of the email message,
>> though he SHOULD NOT add any Sender-header). Moderators SHOULD
>> be prepared to accept articles in either format.
>I think you are being overly optomistic here. There are many moderators
>who will not deal with application/news-transmission either on
>principle or because they can't.
Yes I am, but if you want it to happen you have to provide severe words
that can be quoted against the malefactor by outraged posters whose
articles are rejected. If enough outraged posters protest often enough, it
might eventually happen. But we need to provide them with the ammunition.
It is rather similar to the case of folding in Newsgroups-headers. We say
that various agents MUST accept them. No, we don't expect the change to
happen overnight, or that it will be high on implementors' priority lists,
and we caution posting agents to be conservative by not using the feature.
But anybody who wants his implementation to be compliant HAS to get round
to it eventually. If we had said anything less, it would have been taken
as an excuse to do it never. Call it "You MUST be liberal in what you
accept".
The case in question would have been "Moderators MUST be prepared...",
except that I never impose a MUST requirement on humans (it is just not
realistic to do so).
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5