From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Nov 03 2003 - 08:55:33 CST
As I announced some while back, during the time I have been unable to
make progress on the main draft, I have been working on the text of the
USEAGE document. There are now two fresh drafts on the Landfield site.
http://www.landfield.com/usefor/drafts/draft-ietf-usefor-useage--1.03.unpaged
http://www.landfield.com/usefor/drafts/draft-ietf-usefor-useage--1.03.txt
I would have published these as an official Internet-Draft (*.00.txt),
but we are stuck in a moratorium during the forthcoming IETF meeting
and, in any case, a *.00.txt seems to need a note to the drafts editor
from our Chairman. It was clear I wasn't going to meet the IETF
deadline, so I didn't bother.
But I shall put them up there as soon as the moratorium is over (Pete,
will you please signify your consent in the proper quarters, if that is
necessary).
Essentially, what I have done is to take the snippets of text that
we culled from the earlier USEFOR drafts (and which are still at
http://www.landfield.com/usefor/drafts/draft-ietf-usefor-useage--1.02.unpaged
if you want to go back and look at them) and forged them into a
coherent document. It is organized around a series of chapters entitled
"The Well-Behaved X agent", where X = [posting, followup, reading,
reply, injecting, relaying,serving, hierarchy administrator and
poster]
setting out things which implementors of each should do to conform with
"Best Current Practice". I am open to suggestions for alternative titles
for these (I did toy with the idea of "The Well-Tempered X Agent - cf.
Bach's "Well tempered clavier", and "The Compleat X Agent" - cf. Isaac
Walton's "The Compleat Angler").
Essentially, all the same wordings are there, as taken from the earlier
drafts, but with padding and introductory material to put them in
context and make a document that can be read through from start to
finish with some hope of comprehension.
There is hardly any material that is new - just a modest plug for
"format=flowed" and a few other things that seemed to follow naturally
from other things that were already said. There is a little repetition
of things covered in USEFOR (usually of the form "[USEFOR] says you
MUST/SHOULD do X, but this document says you MUST/SHOULD do Y as well).
Also a few extra plugs for things that are new in USEFOR, and a few
repetitions to save the need to refer back to USEFOR at every page (I
want it to be possible to read through this document and understand what
it it trying to say, and only to go back to [USEFOR] when you really
need the full nitty gritty on some point).
So what next? I need comments on that is there, the way it is presented,
and on what else should be said.
As regards what further material is needed, if we are going to write
a "Best Usenet Practices" document, then we should do a thorough and
complete job of it. There is much in GNKSA that we have not covered, and
probably should, and ditto for RFC 1855. I would therefore suggest a
close look at GNKSA as something to be done pretty soon (I may produce
a summary of comparisons/differences shortly in order to help this
process).
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@clerew.man.ac.uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
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