Charles Lindsey <chl(_at_)clw(_dot_)cs(_dot_)man(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk> writes:
Nobody here has been prepared to say that they expect RFC 2047 encoding
to be around in 20 years time.
I expect to see RFC 2047 encoding still in use in 20 years time. I
believe I already said that.
uuencode is still in very widespread use. BinHex is still in use. EBCDIC
is still in use. Encoding formats don't disappear very quickly.
(If it weren't for these interminable discussions about the far future, we
could release new standards every few years, and if it becomes clear that
people are moving towards something else, we could change the standard.)
My position is basically this: Usenet does not have a lot of mind share
or a lot of market share, but it continues to be very useful for some
particular areas. In particular, it's much more efficient and effective
as a short-term archive than mailing list archives on the web, it's a much
more easily browsable archive format for long-term archives that one wants
to provide on-line, it handles a large number of messages more easily than
e-mail does (particularly over slow links), it's well-suited for applying
filtering techniques to messages without having to view them all, and it
fosters a culture that I personally happen to like. It's possible that
IMAP will replace some or even all of these features eventually, but
widespread use of anonymous IMAP isn't really pushing Usenet aside yet.
I'm interested in continuing to explore what potential Usenet has for
those things that it's good at. As a software implementor, those are the
parts of Usenet that I find interesting. There are significant problems
on Usenet that need resolution, such as more effectively handling rich
content without taxing disk space on smaller servers, experimenting with
better and more varied filtering mechanisms, improving the linkage between
mail and news for gatewaying, and the whole specter of authentication and
authorized article deletion.
Time spent trying to solve problems that are *not* unique to Usenet and
that don't further any of the things that make Usenet interesting and
useful as a protocol suite are not nearly as interesting. In fact,
they're a huge distraction and waste of time and effort for the few people
who are developing *for Usenet* to have to re-solve problems already being
addressed by other protocols. This is *particularly* true when it comes
to problems that are already being solved with e-mail, given that one
reason why there are as many news clients as there are is because it's
fairly trivial to write a news client once you've already written a decent
mail client.
Accordingly, while I'm sure there are all sorts of interesting questions
about the best way to solve these problems, there are *far* more people
thinking about and working on e-mail than there are thinking about or
working on Usenet, and I believe it to be the height of hubris to think
that Usenet is going to be able to charge forward where e-mail is just
beginning to tread. Usenet simply isn't cool enough, interesting enough,
or well-funded enough to be able to drive world revolution in something as
fundamental as character sets by itself.
I would love to see these debates on how e-mail should be handled to
continue, and to be well-considered and well-debated. I want to see
continued resources applied to the problem of finding the best way of
allowing all languages to be easily represented in e-mail.
I think that trying to "help" by going off and doing something completely
different on Usenet is self-destructive, since Usenet doesn't have the
resources to strike out on its own.
In other words, all of these debates are very important, but I think that
so far as possible, Usenet should simply say "this is a different way of
transferring e-mail messages with a few additional fields" and be done
with it, just like RFC 1036 did. People who feel strongly about
particular ways of handling such common problems as internationalization
should contribute actively to the e-mail standards world and Usenet will
*automatically* follow further developments in e-mail.
As an implementor, I would dearly like it if people involved in Usenet
standardization work would stop trying to get me to work on problems that
are not *Usenet* problems and instead let me use the mass of existing
techniques, libraries, and tools for handling the e-mail message format
and concentrate my work on those parts of Usenet that actually make it
*Usenet*. (Like newsgroup names.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>