From: Erland Sommarskog (sommar@algonet.se)
Date: Thu May 09 2002 - 16:05:31 CDT
Andrew Gierth <andrew@erlenstar.demon.co.uk> writes:
> Erland> As for folding Newsgroups, I would welcoming folding of it
> Erland> from a user perspective. I moderated the announce group for
> Erland> the se. hierarchy, and articles are often widely
> Erland> cross-posted. Being permitted to fold Newsgroups or use space
> Erland> would faciliate my work. (I assemble the articles in Emacs,
> Erland> and post directly with inews.)
>
> that's a trivial tool issue. If you want to prepare articles in some
> form other than the standard one, then do so and perform the
> conversion yourself.
Standard and standard... editing articles in Emacs and hand-composing
Newsgroups, was the only way I knew during my first ten years on Usenet.
These days most people post from Windows, and the agents there do more work
for you.
In any case, it is of course an essential matter. I just wanted to
illustrate that there might be a good argument for changing a header,
and then you need to find a good way to have it changed.
> That was the son-of-1036 approach, which generally failed. Standards
> don't change the world. _Implementations_ are what count. So yes, if
> there's any feature that you want, you _SHOULD_ be talking to the
> implementors about it, NOW, rather than assuming that they will
> co-operate later just because you wrote something in the standard.
And the implementors will say "that's not in the RFC". Or at least that
is the sort of argument I have heard from authors of reading agents
when I have complained on bad behaviour.
The essence of what you say, is that we don't need any standard, because
the implementations define the standard. Well, at least that opens for
that radical cut you asked for. Our RFC can now be reduced to "RFC 1036
is hereby abolished".
> the dk.test.whateveritis group is out there now and has been for a
> while. The next step should be to create a moderated one and fix any
> problems _that_ causes.
Yes, we have demonstrated that the UTF-8 name works, but we have always
assumed that it would.
The problem I have had in administring the se.* hiearchy is that people
have proposed groups that logically should be named se.region.skåneland.
We never seriously considered to include the "å" in the newsgroup name,
and one of the arguments was that it is not permitted by the RFC. (And
that "å" would have been in Latin-1 in such case.)
This is an area where a new standard is useful. It is not really
restricted to newsgroup names, but headers in general with
discouragement of the RFC2047 crap in favour of UTF-8.
-- Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, sommar@algonet.se