Xref: utzoo comp.sources.d:3173 news.groups:6760 news.software.b:1838
Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!xanth!hoptoad!gnu
From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d,news.groups,news.software.b
Subject: Re: comp.datasets Call For Discussion
Message-ID: <6182@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 7 Jan 89 04:46:20 GMT
References: <1249@fig.bbn.com> <1280@vsi1.UUCP> <151@cjsa.WA.COM> <394@ispi.UUCP>
Organization: Grasshopper Group in San Francisco
Lines: 34

(Referring to a standard for sending databases over the net):
> =- Format can be ASCII or UUENCODED binary.

We have two new versions of netnews coming out within the month -- C
news and TMNN (News 3.0).  I believe both of them are 8-bit-clean, that
is, the data part of a message can have any 8-bit characters in it
(including nulls and very long lines).  Most of this support is
necessary for "un-American" :-) character set support anyway.  If this is
really true, we should consider simply sending binaries as binaries.

It might be good to add a Format: header field with standard values
(e.g. shar, tar, cpio, arc, msdos binary, vfont, ...) which could be
used by the news reading program to determine how to display and/or
extract the data.  (Actually it probably helps to be able to include
some text, with named binary "attachments".  Then the user interface can
show the text and the list of names, and offer to extract them into
the local filesystem.)  The default Format: would be ISO-Latin-1 text
(ASCII with European characters in the top 128 positions).

We'd have to determine the impact on old-news, NNTP, notes, Fidonet,
and other sites that netnews gateways to, but certainly we can start
with real binaries in a comp.data newsgroup (or alt.data), and folks whose
software can't handle it should simply not receive the newsgroup.  If
it works out, it can be expanded to more newsgroups or to the whole net.

We are close to the point where we can rely on there being a full 8-bit
data path.  It's time to say "folks who don't provide 8 bits must
encode 8-bit data while in transit" rather than "we'll all live with 7
bits forever and uuencode everything".  Just a leetle push now will save
us a *lot* of trouble.
-- 
John Gilmore    {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid,amdahl}!hoptoad!gnu    gnu@toad.com
Love your country but never trust its government.
		     -- from a hand-painted road sign in central Pennsylvania