On Sep 9, 2:42pm, Mark Crispin wrote:
On the other hand, it is arguable that the ``all the world is UNIX'' attitude
is an acceptable one for netnews and there really is no problem with ``just
send 8 bits'' in netnews.
Uh, there are just a few more Windows PCs and Macs out there than UNIX boxes.
There is Netnews in that world, too.
In particular, there are differences in newline conventions. UNIX uses LF,
DOS/Windows uses CRLF. Don't know about the Mac - CRLF? "Just send 8" would
seem to interfere with translation from one into the other.
There is, of course, a problem for implementors of
software that supports both mail and news, since they would have to keep
firmly in mind that they can't ``just send 8 bits'' in mail (read: we'll see
a
lot of illicit 8-bit SMTP to non-EHLO servers).
-- End of excerpt from Mark Crispin
On Sep 9, 3:45pm, Erik E. Fair (Internet Architect) wrote:
As one of the original authors of NNTP, and as a participant in the
MIME effort, I can authoritatively say that NNTP was indeed explicitly
7-bit NETASCII, and anyone just sending 8 bits is in violation of
protocol. The whole idea behind MIME was to get the user interface
software changed to properly support character sets other than ASCII
*independent* of transport and it does no damn good if we don't label
the silly things which is where the "just send 8 bits" idiocy leaves
us. This goes for NetNews too.
Erik E. Fair apple!fair fair(_at_)apple(_dot_)com
-- End of excerpt from Erik E. Fair (Internet Architect)
Amen. And as one of the original authors of the Netnews RFC, I can
authoritatively say that Netnews is intended to be compatible with e-mail.
This implies that you get 7 bits, local newline conventions, reasonably
short lines, etc, unless you agree otherwise. You're supposed to be able
to e-mail Netnews articles around (indeed, the moderation mechanism and
reply command depend on this.) Originally you were supposed to be able to
use an e-mail UA on Netnews data, but that never panned out.
Mark