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Posted by Martijn Lievaart on May 11, 2008, 4:45 pm
Please log in for more thread options On Sun, 11 May 2008 15:24:03 +0200, Peter J. Holzer wrote:
>>
>> Well, there is this slight problem of standards, encoded into RFCs. You
>> don't /have/ to follow them, but it's in general a good idea.
>
> The relevant RFC in this case would be RFC 2046. As fas as I can see
> Andrew did follow the RFC.
I beg to differ.
>
>> HTML in usenet postings is definitely not standard and in fact, any
>> serious newsreader (on any platform, even on Windows) does not render
>> it. Even worse, mime-multipart, although a standard for mail, is not a
>> standard for usenet.
>
> You are mixing up technical standards and social standards. RFC 1036
No, I'm trying not to, although I agree that the technical standards are
less than clear and the social standards important as well.
> refers to RFC 822 for the article format which has later been extended
> by the series of MIME RFCs (starting with RFC 1341 in 1992). Now one
> could argue that since 1341 came after 1036 and 1036 was never revised,
> 1341 is irrelevant - only plain text US-ASCII is allowed in usenet
> messages. However, that is clearly not practical - Usenet is used for
This is correct.
> discussions in many languages, most of which cannot be expressed
> adequately in US-ASCII. Even if the discussion language is English, the
> topic of the discussion (for example, how to process Chinese text in a
> Perl program) may require another character set. And there is absolutely
> no RFC or other authoritative document which says that MIME Content-Type
> is ok for Usenet and MIME multipart is not. Technically, you have to
> accept MIME as a whole or not at all.
This is also correct. Technically speaking, only ASCII is allowed on
Usenet by the RFCs.
That this is completely impractical, yes, I agree wholeheartedly. The
RFCs need updating, badly, which I also said in the post you are replying
to.
The current state of affairs is that most usenet readers either use
Latin-1 (or Windows1252), or pay attention to the Content-type header.
And many do this badly btw. (I would have to search for the details, I
know Pan hasn't let me down yet, but I frequently encounter other
newsreaders that make a mess. On further research it's always the other
newsreader that is at fault. Stuff like setting a correct Content-type
header for ISO-Latin-1, but forgetting to translate the message you're
replying to from utf-8).
>
> However, there is a strong *convention* that Usenet messages (outside of
> the binary groups) should contain only plain text. No images, no fancy
> markup, no sound files, no video. That's a social convention, not a
> technical one. Of course, newsreader authors often only implement
> features for which they see a need - so if nobody posts multipart
> messages, why should they implement support for them? (the newsreader
> you use - Pan - seems to be quite curious in supporting multipart/mixed,
> but not multipart/alternative).
Ah thanks for the correction. I don't do binaries anymore on usenet, so I
didn't know that.
M4
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