From: Per Abrahamsen (abraham@dina.kvl.dk)
Date: Thu Sep 12 2002 - 07:26:38 CDT
rbabel@babylon.pfm-mainz.de (Ralph Babel) writes:
> 5. ________________________________
News headers also used in mail should in general allow a subset of the
syntax allowed by mail. This is because news volume in general are
higher, and need more structure for clients to make that volume
manageable. The more structure, the better automatic processing. At
least as important, the syntax has historically been a subset, and
expanding it will likely break existing code.
An exception is allowing utf-8 in headers. News need this for the
Newsgroups header, where the alternatives are way to ugly.
This means:
Common mail/news clients will be easy to write, they will have to
accept the full mail syntax for headers, with utf-8 instead ascii.
That will cover the need for both mail and news messages.
news2mail gateways will need to RFC 2047 encode headers, but otherwise
be trivial. The same is true for messages posted as both mail and
news.
mail2news gateways will continue to be either complex or broken, which
is no change from the current situation.
The situation will be even better if mail adopts UTF8 in the future,
and we will not be stuck with an obsolete kludge for the newsgroup
header. But even if they don't, the situation will be at least as
good as any of the alternatives.
I'd have prefered moderated non-ascii newsgroups would have been
outlawed the present standard, and reconsidered for the next revision.