Re: I-D ACTION:draft-hoffman-news-nntp-uri-03.txt

Charles Lindsey wrote:

 [2.2]
>| If the newsURL is of one of the following forms:
>|        <URL:news:*>
>|        <URL:news://news.example.com/*>
>|        <URL:news://news.example.com/>
>|        <URL:news://news.example.com>
>| it refers to "all available news groups".

Here you probably want news:* etc. without "<URL:" and ">" as
in all other examples.
 
> Issue: Do we really want all those forms? Only the first was
> in RFC 1738.

And that's exactly the form not supported by my browser, the
other three work.  In draft-gilman-news-url-02 the "*" is only
mentioned as a general wildcard within or for a newsgroup-name.

> Some agents are known to barf on anything with '*' in it

My UA handles <news://news.gmane.org/gmane.org.w3c.*> like
<news://news.gmane.org/> or <news://news.gmae.org>.  The "*"
has apparently no additional effect.

> Maybe the '*' part of the notation should be dispensed with.

How about removing it from the syntax and copying the note
about it from draft-gilman-news-url-02 to section 2.2:

| Note that user agents may extend the ability to refer to
| groups by use of "*" as a string wild-card.

This simplifies the syntax for all-groups:

| all-groups  = news-server [ "/" ]

IMHO that's clearer and still covers the strange case news:* in
RfC 1738, although my newsreader doesn't understand this case.

 [NNTP]
>| news-server =  "//" server

You have this already in chapter 2, so better don't repeat it,
because the explanation in chapter 2 is also valid here for the
nntp scheme.
 
> 3.1  The range is a single <article-number>

Is it really always a number ?  My browsers don't support it,
therefore I cannot test it.  Your article on GMaNe has a header
Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.org.w3c.uri:329

What's the corresponding nntp URL ?  Some simple ideas:

<nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.org.w3c.uri:329>
<nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.org.w3c.uri/329>

Or the same question in another form, can the delimiter between
newsgroup-name and range also be a ":" instead of a "/" ?

BTW, draft-gilman-news-url-02 also mentions snews (port 536),
news over TLS/SSL, and my browsers (try to) support this.  Is
it okay to simply add snews here ?  That would probably require
a short "IANA considerations" to register the snews scheme, and
it's definitely not what Paul wanted with this draft, but OTOH
it's trivial, and I don't see any possible harm.

                          Bye, Frank

Received on Tuesday, 21 December 2004 19:22:41 UTC