This I-D is intended to show an alternative way forward for usefor, if
the IESG were to recharter the working group. I should be clear that
it's mainly an outline, and that if this direction were pursued, there
would be a lot of useful to work to pull out of Charles' draft and into
this one and a separate policy draft.
General discussions about the direction of usefor still presumably
belong on that list. If you'd like to improve this I-D, please join the
group news(_at_)dankohn(_dot_)com (by sending "subscribe" to
news-request(_at_)dankohn(_dot_)com) or go to
<http://www.dankohn.com/mailman/listinfo/news_dankohn.com>. There's no
reason for follow-ups to ietf-822, as they can join usefor or
news(_at_)dankohn(_dot_)com if they're interested.
Here is a proposed recharter:
USENET news remains one of the largest sources of Internet traffic,
although its primary specification, RFC 1036, is long out-of-date.
Usefor was chartered 6 years ago, but the group is heading with tenuous
consensus toward an approach unlikely to be approved by the IESG.
This rechartered working group will update this news article
specification, using a normative reference to Section 3 of RFC 2822 (the
legal to generate email syntax) as the basis for the news message
standard going forward. It will further define the applicability of
MIME (RFC 2045, 2046, and 2049). It will also define the appropriate
news-specific headers from RFC 1036, and deprecate those no longer in
use.
The group will enable the i18n of user-visible header text in such a way
as to preserve backward compatibility with existing clients, servers,
and gateways for mail and news. This will require 7-bit encoding of
i18n characters, likely using RFC 2047/2231 and/or nameprep+punycode (as
with IDNA). The general approach will be the one laid out in
<http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-kohn-news-article-00.txt>.
The group will also publish a standards-track policy document describing
responsibilities and recommendations for news agents, servers, and
gateways. This document will also consider how clients, servers, and
gateways should deal with the existing unstable situation of 8-bit
newsgroup names in various unlabeled character sets, and specify a
transition plan for such newsgroups, if feasible.
An explicit goal of the group is to ensure cross-compatibility with mail
gateways. The group's charter is to create a stable base document
defining the news message format, which can act as a foundation for new
innovations going forward. The group will not standardize any
technology other than i18n that is not already in wide use, such as
strong verification of control messages, raw UTF-8 headers, cancel
locks, etc. Work on such areas would take place in a separate working
group, if such a group were later chartered.
Goals and Milestones
Apr 2003
+ Produce a first Internet-Draft describing the news article format in a
form compatible with the charter
May 2003
+ Produce a first Internet-Draft describing policy for news agents,
servers, and gateways.
Jun 2003
+ Produce a second article Internet-Draft
September 2003
+ Produce a second policy Internet-Draft
November 2003
+ Submit article and policy documents to IESG for approval and close
working group.
- dan
--
Dan Kohn <mailto:dan(_at_)dankohn(_dot_)com>
<http://www.dankohn.com/> <tel:+1-650-327-2600>
-----Original Message-----
From: Internet-Drafts(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
[mailto:Internet-Drafts(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org]
Sent: Tuesday, February 04, 2003 03:45
Subject: I-D ACTION:draft-kohn-news-article-00.txt
A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts
directories.
Title : News Article Format
Author(s) : D. Kohn
Filename : draft-kohn-news-article-00.txt
Pages : 13
Date : 2003-2-3
This document defines the format and procedures for interchange of
network news articles. It updates and obsoletes RFC 1036, in
particular adding support for internationalization of headers and
message bodies and multimedia support in message bodies. It does
this in a manner designed to maximize backward compatibility with
mail and news servers, gateways, and user agents.
Network news articles resemble mail messages but are broadcast to
potentially-large audiences, using a flooding algorithm that
propagates one copy to each interested host (or group thereof),
typically stores only one copy per host, and does not require any
central administration or systematic registration of interested
users. Network news originated as the medium of communication for
Usenet, circa 1980. Since then Usenet has grown explosively, and many
Internet sites participate in it. In addition, the news technology is
now in widespread use for other purposes, on the Internet and
elsewhere.
A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-kohn-news-article-00.txt
To remove yourself from the IETF Announcement list, send a message to
ietf-announce-request with the word unsubscribe in the body of the
message.
Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP. Login with the
username
"anonymous" and a password of your e-mail address. After logging in,
type "cd internet-drafts" and then
"get draft-kohn-news-article-00.txt".
A list of Internet-Drafts directories can be found in
http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html
or ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf/1shadow-sites.txt
Internet-Drafts can also be obtained by e-mail.
Send a message to:
mailserv(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org(_dot_)
In the body type:
"FILE /internet-drafts/draft-kohn-news-article-00.txt".
NOTE: The mail server at ietf.org can return the document in
MIME-encoded form by using the "mpack" utility. To use this
feature, insert the command "ENCODING mime" before the "FILE"
command. To decode the response(s), you will need "munpack" or
a MIME-compliant mail reader. Different MIME-compliant mail
readers
exhibit different behavior, especially when dealing with
"multipart" MIME messages (i.e. documents which have been split
up into multiple messages), so check your local documentation on
how to manipulate these messages.
Below is the data which will enable a MIME compliant mail reader
implementation to automatically retrieve the ASCII version of the
Internet-Draft.