Re: News and nntp URI schemes

[Frank Ellermann <nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Charles Lindsey wrote:

> If you want to comment, please do so to the URI list

I'll do that separately, here I'm only interested in a
technical detail relevant for Usefor:
 
>| <id-left> and <id-right> are defined in Section 3.6.4 of
>| RFC 2822 [RFC2822]. They MUST be in a canonical form in
>| which no <quoted-string> or <quoted-pair> is used in a
>| context where the same semantic meaning could have been
>| rendered without such quoting; moreover, no whitespace or
>| ">" may be included, whether %-encoded or not and/or quoted
>| or not.
 
>| For example, neither
>|     news:"abcd"@example.com
>| nor
>|     news:"ab\cd"@example.com
>| is in canonical form, because the form
>|     news:abcd@xxxxxxxxxxx
>| is available.

This text assumes that draft-usefor-02 is already on standards
track, but that is not the case.  The "official" definition is
still <unique@full_domain_name>, an "unofficial" definition is
"<" local-part "@" domain ">"

| unique is any string of printing ASCII characters, not
| including "<" (left angle bracket), ">" (right angle 
| bracket), or "@" (at sign).
[...]
| Programmers are urged not to make assumptions about the
| content of Message-ID fields from other hosts, but to treat
| them as unknown character strings.

The proposed "canonical form" makes assumptions, and therefore
it's incompatible with RfC 1036 Message-IDs.  And the news URL
in RfC 1738 was about RfC 1036 Message-IDs:

| A <message-id> corresponds to the Message-ID of section 2.1.5
| of RFC 1036, without the enclosing "<" and ">"; it takes the
| form <unique>@<full_domain_name>.

No id-right, no id-left, no RfC 2822 nonsense.  Even in the old
<http://www.newsreaders.com/tech/draft-gilman-news-url-02.txt>
it is message = local-part "@" domain

No id-right, no id-left, and RfC 1036 in the references.  These
are FOUR relevant sources, 2 RfCs, one future FYI, and an old
draft, all using a sane concept of Message-ID.  Please replace
the RfC 2822 reference together with id-right and id-left by
the correct format defined in RfC 1036.

                           Bye, Frank