[SpamCop-List] Re: patent-fr

[Philippe Verdy (n.o-s.p.a.m+abuse)]

"Philippe Verdy" <verdy_p(n.o-s.p.a.m+abuse)@wanadoo.fr> a écrit dans le 
message de news: do1m6h$jbo$1 at news.spamcop.net...
> "Ant" <not at home.today> a écrit dans le message de news: 
> do197i$cm5$1 at news.spamcop.net...
>> "Philippe Verdy" wrote:
>>
>>> Plonk me if you wish, but I won't change back this, due to antiquity
>>> mail/news readers.
>>
>> It's not really about old newsreaders, but more to do with the
>> accepted behaviour in newsgroups.
>
> Wrong. There does not exist any such *accepted* behaviour:accepted by 
> whom? (Note that "behaviour" is related to the content of messages, 
> respect of persons, topics, and crossposting policies, but not about the 
> technical ways through which the messages can be posted.)
>
> MIME is a RFC standard like newsgroups (but MIME has evolved more 
> gracefully than NNTP which looks like a dynosaur today). MIME was intended 
> to support all message formats independantly of the transport used (so it 
> was created for NNTP too, not only for SMTP). Its updates do represent a 
> better view of state-of-the-art solutions foraddressing international 
> issues.


Another note:

NNTP, published more than 16 years ago as RFC 977 (augmented by RFC 1036 in 
1987 for interoperability of newsgroup mirror servers), has never evolved 
into a approved standard. Its only update is in RFC 2980 (which is 
"informational" only, even less than RFC977 which was at least a "proposed 
standard", and it does not address any issue related to message format).

Even in 2000, when the NNTP extensions were discussed, the contributors were 
only writers of very outdated clients targeting UNIX implementations only, 
and only the server-side part of the protocol was addressed.