From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Feb 03 2004 - 08:42:46 CST
In <401CED49.1010101@erols.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
>> Would you like me to propose an alternative wording to the effect that
>> relayers MUST not re-encode (except at gateways) and add that the correct
>> behaviour if it is believed the receiving agent cannot accept 8bit is to
>> refuse to relay.
>Yes, but you can stop after "(except at gateways)", avoiding the issue of
>how an agent is expected to determine (or guess) what capabilities a
>receiving agent might or might not have (since there is no provision for
>any suitable mechanism for making such a determination or guess).
OK, I now have:
Moreover, a body or body part that uses Content-Transfer-Encoding
8bit MUST NOT have that encoding changed to quoted-printable or bas64
during transmission, except in the course of gatewaying into some
other medium such as email (8.8).
NOTE: An agent that was incapable of handling 8bit would be
unlikely to be able to make use of the article on its own
servers, and the usual flooding algorithm would likely find some
alternative route to get the article to destinations where it is
needed.
Recall that this is in the context of and expands upon an earlier
paragraph which states that:
Transmission paths for news articles MUST treat news articles as
uninterpreted sequences of octets, excluding the values 0 (US-ASCII
NUL) and 13 and 10 (US-ASCII CR and LF, ......
-- 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