From: Nick Boalch (n.g.boalch@durham.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Dec 02 2003 - 16:30:33 CST
It looks good. The tone seems appropriate and the draft consistency reads with
clarity.
Would it be useful for readers to have, in addition to the clearly explained
and annotated items currently presented in the draft, a summary in simple
bullet-point form of the requirements, perhaps presented as a conclusion to
the draft?
(I'll perhaps have a go at reducing the draft's advice to individual points,
to see if it can be achieved without compromising the actual validity of the
advice too far.)
On individual points:
Section 3.1.1.2 on address munging suggests user-agents make it difficult to
munge addresses. Though I've no wish to stir up old arguments, I think this is
a little misguided as evidence in the wild suggests a powerful trend towards
address munging. I would have:
... the practice. However, it shows how to do it "correctly"
and it is NOT recommended that implementors facilitate other
means of disguising addresses.
(I think encouraging use of .invalid as opposed to the made-up names, use of
other people's domain names and other such foolery currently seen all over
Usenet is a good thing.)
An internal note in section 3.1.1.3 refers to a draft on Message-ID
construction prepared early on in the project. Are you referring to
'Recommendations for generating Message-IDs' (Matt Curtin and Jwz) or
'Guidelines for the Generation of Message IDs and Similar Unique Identifiers'
(Claus Andre Faerber) -- I'm assuming the latter.
Section 3.1.1.4 - I don't see any real reason why the MUST NOT needs to be
downgraded. Are there hordes of people queuing up to start their
Subject-headers with "cmsg "?
Do we have any comment to make in 3.1.1.9 about posting agents generating
Followup-To headers pointing to groups which do not exist on their immediate
host? (I believe most current servers disallow this behaviour.)
On a separate issue, I definitely think that co-operation between (y)our
efforts on this BCP and the GNKSA people needs to be encouraged: GNKSA is
well-established, if not an 'official' IETF document, and there seems little
point in setting up two conflicting guides. I don't think GNKSA differs very
significantly from our document, except by omission.
Regards,
N.
-- Nick Boalch, Research Student School of Modern European Languages Tel: +44 (0) 191 334 5780 University of Durham Fax: +44 (0) 191 334 5770 New Elvet, Durham DH1 3JT, UK WWW: http://nick.frejol.org/