RE: nntp-extensions Re: ietf-nntp NNTP SEARCH extension internet- draftavailable

["David Johnson (Exchange)" <[e-mail]>]

> ----------
> From: 
> 	[e-mail][SMTP:[e-mail]]
>  on behalf of Chris Newman[SMTP:[e-mail]]
> 1) Don't muck with the way IMAP did the charsets for searching.  
> Choosing
> iso-8859-1 as the default is completely wrong for the russian newsgroups
> where koi8-r is the default.  Why not just keep the [CHARSET 
> charset_name]
> grammar from IMAP with the default CHARSET of us-ascii?  It won't
> kill the Europeans to make the "CHARSET iso-8859-1" explicit, and it 
> will
> make the Russians and others much happier.  Using MIME-2 strings just
> makes things unnecessarily complex -- who would want to search with
> multiple character sets at the same time?  That's rare enough that the
> extra code (and associated speed loss) necessary to make it work is a
> lose.  It took us months to settle on the CHARSET mechanism in IMAP's
> search command -- please don't make us go through the debate again.  
> It's
> implementable and meets international demand.
> 
I agree -- mucking with MIME-2 encoding is unnecessarily complex. I 
also think this is true of the LIST PRETTYNAMES extension in the other 
recent NNTP draft submitted by Brian Hernacki. IMAP has a well defined 
way to support internationalized mailbox names using utf-7. If we are 
going to internationalize NNTP then we should follow the same practice. 
This is much cleaner and easier than MIME-2 encoding, and increases the 
commonality between the protocols.

Regardless of whether IMAP or NNTP wins as the newsreader protocol of 
the future, we shouldn't be deliberately introducing inconsistencies 
that make the protocols diverge even further.

- David

-----------------
David C. Johnson   <[e-mail]>
Program Manager -- Microsoft Exchange
Microsoft Corporation