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Re: message IDs (was Re: mail vs. news ???)

2003-02-24 22:25:19

Bruce Lilly <blilly(_at_)erols(_dot_)com> writes:

Mark can certainly speak for himself, but my interpretation of what he
wrote is that NNTP could choose to use the bracketing as a way around
the lack of general quoting for command parameters to work around the
specific case of a backslash- quoted space inside a no-fold-quote in a
msg-id.  Of course, then there would be \> to deal with...  It would
have been nice if a quoting mechanism had been part of the NNTP
protocol, but it wasn't and isn't so here we are, trying to work around
that omission.

Adding quoting mechanisms is valuable when you have a real need to be able
to use the full range of available characters.

I see absolutely no useful purpose served by allowing whitespace in
message IDs, apart from being compatible with a portion of the mail
protocol that no one uses.  I would therefore go so far as to say that the
choice, viewed in isolation, is just good engineering in the NNTP
standard.  Adding an escape protocol when you don't need one and can
simply harmlessly limit the range of input instead means everyone has less
work they have to do, the protocol is less complex, and all software
implementing it is less complex.

I'm not brushing off the issue, nor am I claiming that it is of no
importance, so I feel no need to defend those particular straw men.  But
I would point out that none of RFCs 822, 850, or 1036 mentioned any sort
of message-id upper length limit;

Some limit falls naturally out of the NNTP protocol, yeah, rather than the
article format.  Although not the 250 one; that comes out of an old
software issue.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu)             
<http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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