From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Fri Sep 13 2002 - 09:54:26 CDT
In <rj7khro0ld.fsf@zuse.dina.kvl.dk> Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> writes:
>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.
Yes, I agree with just about everything you have said above. It describes
precisely what we have been trying to achieve.
>I'd have prefered moderated non-ascii newsgroups would have been
>outlawed the present standard, and reconsidered for the next revision.
And who is to say it would be any easier then :-( .
The difficulty we face is that if we do not get this standard out soon, the
"people out there" are just going to go ahead and do it anyway. And when
they do that, they usually do it in a sub-optimal fashion (look at YEnc).
-- 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