Re: ietf-nntp Newsgroup Name Length Question
"Martin J. Duerst" <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch> Mon, 20 January 1997 12:17 UTC
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Date: Mon, 20 Jan 1997 13:11:09 +0100
From: "Martin J. Duerst" <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>
To: Stan Barber <sob@academ.com>
cc: Kenneth Herron <kherron@campus.mci.net>, ietf-nntp@academ.com, jack@wildbear.on.ca
Subject: Re: ietf-nntp Newsgroup Name Length Question
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On Wed, 15 Jan 1997, Stan Barber wrote: > Ken writes: > > Defining a group name as a non-empty sequence of characters not > > including control characters, white space, wildmat wildcards, commas, > > and whatever I've forgotten should be fine. > > I like this. We'll need to define the "whatever I've forgotten" part, but > this seems like a reasonable approach. Here is something for "whatever I've forgotten": Internationalization. There are good reasons why the widely distributed newsgroups have ASCII-only names, but there is no need to restrict this for newsgroups that are used more locally. There are various ways with which non-ASCII usegroup names could be allowed. One would be to use UTF-8, an ASCII-compatible encoding of UNicode/ISO 10646, the universal character set. This would be along the recommendations of the IAB charset workshop (see draft-weider-iab-char-wrkshop-00.txt) and would work together well with other areas such as ftp and URNs. If the syntactic limitation to ASCII in newsgroup names turns out to be too hard to change, there are other ways to introduce multilingual names. For examples, please see draft-duerst-dns-i18n-00.txt or RFC2060, section 5.1.3. What is particularly important is that whatever way of internationalization is choosen, it can affect "reasonable" name length (in terms of bytes) considerably. For example, while the limitation of DNS to 63 bytes per part and 255 overall is extremely generous for English domain names that can be represented directly in ASCII, it is considerably less generous for characters beyond ASCII that have to be encoded with more than one byte. A restriction to 14 bytes per part could mean a restriction to only 3 characters or even less, depending on the character's place in Unicode/ISO10646 and the choosen encoding. So while it makes sense to give indications as to the length of group names, these should not only be based on the list of existing newsgroups. Regards, Martin.
- Re: ietf-nntp Newsgroup Name Length Question Stan Barber
- ietf-nntp Newsgroup Name Length Question Ernie Vanden-Ende
- Re: ietf-nntp Newsgroup Name Length Question Stan Barber
- Re: ietf-nntp Newsgroup Name Length Question Evan Champion
- Re: ietf-nntp Newsgroup Name Length Question Stan Barber
- Re: ietf-nntp Newsgroup Name Length Question Evan Champion
- Re: ietf-nntp Newsgroup Name Length Question Kenneth Herron
- Re: ietf-nntp Newsgroup Name Length Question Jack De Winter
- Re: ietf-nntp Newsgroup Name Length Question Kenneth Herron
- Re: ietf-nntp Newsgroup Name Length Question Chris Lewis
- Re: ietf-nntp Newsgroup Name Length Question Nick Christenson
- Re: ietf-nntp Newsgroup Name Length Question Eric Cole
- Re: ietf-nntp Newsgroup Name Length Question Brian Kantor
- Re: ietf-nntp Newsgroup Name Length Question Martin J. Duerst