From: Chris Lewis (clewis@pte.nortelnetworks.com)
Date: Sat Jun 08 2002 - 23:43:25 CDT
Charles Lindsey wrote:
In all, a reasonable summary.
> .... Nevertheless, some CNews systems
> undoubtedly DO encapsulate at the present time, and I have never had
> an article rejected or fail to be posted for that reason. Whether the
> moderators concerned curse and swear at me behind their closed doors, I
> wouldn't know :-( .
I cursed, and was cursed at ;-)
Seriously, I think care should be taken to stress that C news, when it
encapsulated
(which I suspect was in the minority of C news installs, and there
certainly
aren't many C news installations left anywhere), encapsulated "very
stupid", nothing at all like what is proposed.
It just put the article, as constructed by Pnews/inews/nntpd, into the
body of
the message - the news headers were just more text.
Much as a full bore mime-ish solution would be nice, I'm in Russ' camp,
but more so - by enshrining a standard such as this, particularly with
any major decoding requirements, a lot of moderators with primitive
tools (and no facilities to use anything better) are going to have a
massive problem when they start receiving such posts. Think: "moderator
on AOL" where they have problems just inserting Approved lines.
This may lead to the evolution of multi-group stump-like servers would
fill the gap. But, I'm not convinced that even that will have
sufficient penetration. If you go encapsulation, I feel that you're
more likely to be successful with formats/protocols that already exist,
and manageable with standard tools (Outlook, gag..., etc), not new
formats or protocols.
[Keep in mind that there's actually two mime parts, the as-is Usenet
headers, and the potentially multi-part body, that have to be
encapsulated in a mail message. I fear the first time a moderator got
one of these in, say, Unicode, their head'll burst ;-)]
At this point, I'll shut up.