From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Oct 07 2002 - 06:37:40 CDT
In <ylptuosxlq.fsf@windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
>greg andruk <gja@meowing.net> writes:
>> Thing is that in this case, it has been implemented, a few times
>> over. It wants a bit of standardization work is all.
>I'm game to help at least. I'm getting more and more persuaded that this
>is the best solution. And everything you say about the Newsgroups header
>being fundamentally broken is entirely correct.
Which means that if were designing Netnews from scratc, one would likely
do it differently.
But to change the whole concept of newsgroup naming from the present
hierarchical system as this stage of the game is simply not on. The
present system works well enough, is widely (though not universally)
understood, and is even helpful for many purposes.
Yes, as Brad says, a DAG might be better, but introduces additional
complications (you would probably need a strict tree to form its
backbone). But even a DAG would still use recognized words and mnemonics
that people who understood the applicable language could relate to.
But to insist that arabic/chinese/whatever newsgroups should be in
perpetuity stuck with tags in ASCII that are largely meaningless to their
readers, and with an added hierarchy of translators and lookup mechanisms
on top, is baroqueness for its own sake. And all to avoid a problem that
does not exist - namely to force a 7bit structure onto a transport that is
already 8bit clean.
And in the few places where interoperability with mail is required,
notably sending to moderators, it will be no solution, because what the
moderator will see is the ASCII tag, not the "real" name of the group
(because you cannot expect mail to understand the machinery for
translating it into 'prettyname' form).
-- 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