ietf-nntp Re: nntp-extensions Character sets in draft-hernacki-nntpsrch-00
Ben Polk <bpolk@netscape.com> Thu, 10 October 1996 00:16 UTC
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To: "David Johnson (Exchange)" <djohnson@exchange.microsoft.com>,
"'nntp-extensions@academ.com'" <nntp-extensions@academ.com>
From: Ben Polk <bpolk@netscape.com>
Subject: ietf-nntp Re: nntp-extensions Character sets in
draft-hernacki-nntpsrch-00
Cc: ietf-nntp@academ.com
Date: Wed, 9 Oct 1996 17:01:21 -0700
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At 02:47 PM 10/9/96 -0700, David Johnson (Exchange) wrote: I've copied this message to ietf-nntp because the first item below talks about changes to the new NNTP RFC. >> One exception defined by this RFC to the 7bit character set restriction >> for commands in [NNTP-977] is that the 8bit ISO-8859-1 character set is >> allowed in unencoded form in search strings. This is allowed because it >> simplifies handling this widely used character set, without requiring >> support of arbitrary binary data. > >This would be better addressed in Stan Barber's base specification, so a >uniform method of encoding non-ascii arguments to commands is defined >rather than potentially inventing a new encoding with each new >extension. I have sent a separate e-mail to ietf-nntp on this issue. I don't agree. The base draft is intended to document current practice, plus provide a means for extensions. Current practise is that all NNTP commands and their arguments are 7 bit ASCII. Perhaps this extension to allow 8 bits in the search text should be recast into a more general extension that allows 8 bit data in all NNTP commands and arguments? >I disagree with the following restriction in the draft: > >> LIST SEARCHES >> >> Returns a list of strings that define which newgroups are being indexed >> by the news server and are thus available for searching. In addition, >> the character sets allowed for each group is returned. The language in the document wasn't clear. The intent is to restrict the character set of the queries. I will clarify this. >Restricting newsgroups to "allow" only certain character sets is a >mistake. This is both unenforceable and unnecessary. All that is needed >is to specify the character set of the search criteria. If the server >does not support that character set then an error response should be >returned. I agree with all this. Thanks for your commends David. Ben Polk Netscape News Server Engineering