From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Sat Oct 19 2002 - 12:28:11 CDT
Benjamin Franz <snowhare@nihongo.org> writes:
> 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.
Yup.
> 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.
[...]
> *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.
What he said.
> 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.
Well, I still disagree there, as an implementor. 100% transparency makes
life so much easier that you will *very much* notice when implementing,
and the only real reasons for not going with 100% transparency in the
standard (and then letting people be liberal in what they accept, as
always) is the attraction of unencoded Unicode. Which I think Greg and
Eric are dispensing with nicely.
But regardless, it doesn't matter what my opinion is or what your opinion
is; it matters what people actually implement and make work. Someone will
at some point do that, and then hopefully we'll be able to go back and
document it and make it a standard. If I'm right, people who try to
implement unencoded Unicode as the general solution will run smack into a
wall of opposition and problems when they try to deploy and that will be
that. If I'm not, then hey, I will have learned something, and that's
always good.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>