From: Benjamin Franz (snowhare@nihongo.org)
Date: Sat Oct 19 2002 - 10:48:00 CDT
On Thu, 17 Oct 2002, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
> Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz said:
> >> If the 8-bit stuff can be pulled out of the base,
> > Then this whole exercise will have been a waste of time. I see no
> > point to issuing a replacement to RFC 1036 that does not provide for
> > Unicode in newsgroup names.
>
> Seconded.
Thirded.
This is going to be long - if you don't like to hear someone saying "we've
wasted our time", feel free to skip it.
If we aren't going to get Unicode newsgroup names, we may has well
terminate this entire exercise and declare failure. The remaining items
left in the draft are insufficient to justify a replacement for 1036 that
has taken years to produce.
I am also quite annoyed at the 'well, then non-ASCII groups can't be
moderated is a solution' proposal. That isn't a solution - it's a
declaration of 'screw you, and the horse you rode in on' to everyone
outside the ASCII named newsgroups.
I am firmly convinced at this point that Usefor is simply incapable of
producing an RFC that will be relevant to the actual practices of the
Usenet. The insoluble problems _are not_ technical - they are all 'people
problems'. I was astonished at the political infighting that html-wg went
through, but their political problems were small fish compared to the ones
Usefor has labored under.
html-wg finally succeeded in documenting html 2.0 as existing practice
(only about 3 years after it _was_ existing practice...). But they
_failed_ in their goal of publishing an HTML 3.0 RFC. As a result W3C
'took possession of the ball' and succeeded where html-wg failed. It might
be instructive to look at the message titled "Standards, Work Groups, and
Reality Checks: A Radical Proposal".
http://www.nyct.net/~aray/htmlwg/1189.html
I sent it to html-wg shortly before it was ended in late 1995. Read the
'Rules' I enunciated in that message and the last sentence. If you can't
hear the echos of Usefor's dysfunction there, you aren't listening. In the
days after I sent that mail, I got a lot of 'the group is fine, you are
mistaken' messages.
html-wg was already dead when I wrote that message - it just didn't know
it yet. It took until Sep 1996 for the flopping to stop.
Usefor is failing (if not already failed) - make no mistake there.
*IF* there will be a next generation Usenet - it will not come from here.
This work group _may_ be able to produce a documentation RFC for existing
(or roughly existing) practice that tidies a few niggling implementation
details. But that's it. It has no prayer of producing a 'Usenet NG'
document.
Usenet NG will come from someone sitting down with at most two or three
other people and hammering out a protocol (quite probably leveraging the
Usefor draft) that while largely inter-operable with the existing Usenet,
will strike out on its own with I18N and recognition that while mail and
news are _similar_ they are not (and cannot be required to be) 100%
transparent to each other.
There will be complaints about the way they chose to do things, flamefests
by moderators receiving 8-bit or encapsulated text, and general bad will
from the 'old guard' about the 'high handed' behavior in having _dared_ to
tamper with their view of How Things Should Be Done.
And life will go on.
-- JerryI should either have been less specific or more correct ...
---Andy Armstrong <andy@wonderworks.co.uk>