From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk)
Date: Mon May 03 2004 - 06:28:07 CDT
In <Pine.LNX.4.53.0404301017500.18711@a.shell.peak.org> John Stanley <stanley@peak.org> writes:
>Charles Lindsey (chl@clerew.man.ac.uk):
>A comment on a sillyness in your reply to Bruce:
>>You cannot prescribe in a standard what 'users' should do.
>So, should I choose to create an article using no followup agent other
>than vi, the standard cannot tell me what I must put into the article,
>the news system should accept anything I happen to feel like creating,
>because the standard cannot prescribe what I do? You cannot tell me, as a
>user, that what I wrote is not a valid article, so as such, it will be
>accepted by any relay agent that I pass it to?
You can indeed construct any article you like using vi. If you choose to
include a References-header it will technically be a followup, and vice
versa. The Subject can be whatever you like. If all the rest of the
headers are consistent with the draft, then it will be a valid article
and the injecting agent (not the relaying agent) will allow it through. If
not, it won't.
>Or do you intend that vi should be written to recognize the text being
>entered as "news article" and act accordingly, enforing the proscriptions
>of the news standard?
>Of course we can prescribe what users do, if they are acting in the
>function of a news agent. Don't be silly.
No, we don't prescribe what users do. We prescribe what injecting agents
(in this case) do.
-- 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