From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Sep 02 2003 - 11:14:20 CDT
Much silence of late. No word from our Chair. How to move forward?
To recall, when our new Chairs were appointed they proposed splitting the
document as follows:
#1 (standards track) Article format (i.e. syntax and semantics)
#2 (standards track) Netnews Protocol
#3 (informational) Usenet usage and netiquette
#4 (experimental) I18N of headers (e.g. using UTF-8)
The #3 split had already been agreed before the new Chairs were appointed,
so there was nothing new there. The USEAGE material has now been removed
from USEFOR and dumped in a "-1" draft which you can see on
www.landfield.com. Since I am stuck with progress on other fronts, I have
been working on a proper USEAGE draft (a coherent document instead of a
collection of ill-fitting paragraphs) and hope to have a draft for you to
see fairly soon. However, #3 is not the top priority, so that work will
stop as soon as it becomes possible to make progress on other fronts.
The #4 split was generally welcomed by the WG as solving (at least for the
time being) the impasse we were in. There was a clear consensus to take
that step. The I18N material has now been removed from USEFOR, but there
is no work done on writing #4 yet. There was a suggestion that some work
on I18N of headers in Email would be a useful pre-requisite, and it was
suggested that some useful ideas were being floated around. But I have
seen nothing. Is anyone aware of anything that is going on?
The split of the rest of USEFOR into #1 and #2 was never really discussed
on this WG, and some people (myself included) expressed reservations as to
whether it would gain anything. So maybe that is the debate we should have
next.
The current situation is that I am awaiting a final decision on a few
technical issues, notably "Re: " in Subject-headers. After that, there are
various tidying up operations needed on the draft. After removal of so
much material to #3 and #4, there are a few sections that are no longer
earning their keep, and other things that do not fit together as well as
they might. So the next task is to fix those things.
However, I do not want to embark on a tidying exercise until I know
whether the #1/#2 split is going to occur, because that split ought to be
done at the same time. So please can we have some debate about that?
AFAICS, everything in Section 8 would belong in #2, but everything else
(or nearly so) would remnain in #1. In which case, what is the point? A
lot of boilerplate and other introductory material would have to be
repeated, so you would end up with two documents, of rather unequal size,
which together would be longer than what we started with.
So I would ask those in favour of the #1/#2 split to look carefully
through the latest draft (-11) and tell me what else, if anything, they
believe should be moved to #2
-- 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. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5