Re: News and nntp URIs

Frank

As before, I cannot reply direct to your e-mails; Windows INSISTS you are now a
news group:-)  So snipping and pasting, you said

"
It's an erroneous IANA registration.  Henry Spencer, the author of
"son-of-1036", introduced MIME into NetNews, and while he was at it
he registered message/news.  It's an 8bit variant of message/rfc822,
the USEFOR WG will formally deprecate it in I-D.ietf-usefor-usepro:
<http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-usefor-usepro-09#section-7>

He also registered news-message-id as message/external access type,
but somehow that ended up in the wrong registry for *media* types
<http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/application/> instead
of <http://www.iana.org/assignments/access-types>.

Fixing a very old registry error, it's not important *where* that's
done, but it has to be an RFC (required by RFC 4289).  Henry Spencer
registered news-message-id before the RFC 2048 rules (now RFC 4289)
existed.   Don't use application/news-message-id, it's as bogey. :-)
"
which is clear and fine.  But the I-D says something different, namely

"
8.3.  'news-message-ID' access type

   The MIME 'news-message-ID' access type was erroneously listed as
   subtype.  IANA should remove 'news-message-ID' from the application
   subtype registry, and add it to the access type registry defined in
   [RFC4289]: <http://www.iana.org/assignments/access-types>.

   [RFC4289] requires an RFC for the access types registry. "

OK so far but

" Because  [son-of-1036] was never published as RFC the following paragraph
quotes the relevant definition:"

loses me; where is it quoting from? what is the relevance of this definition?
what is the reference to IANA at the end doing? I do not see the point of the
paragraph.

Surely what you have said so far is enough, perhaps adding your final sentence,

"  Please note that 'news' URLs offer a very similar and (today) more
   common way to access articles by their Message-ID, compare [RFC2017].
"
with perhaps an additional clause
"so the use of application/news-message-id is discouraged"

Tom Petch

Received on Monday, 31 December 2007 11:40:23 UTC