Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Time for 8 bit news, isn't it?????.
Message-ID: <1990Jul21.231352.6234@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Jul13.022224.25441@lth.se> <3119.269d97ea@mccall.com> <777@hades.ausonics.oz.au> <15688@bfmny0.BFM.COM> <1990Jul21.054016.10409@looking.on.ca>
Date: Sat, 21 Jul 90 23:13:52 GMT

In article <1990Jul21.054016.10409@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes:
>I would support a move to design a binary transmission format, have the
>new releases of B and C news support them...

Unless there is something I have overlooked, C News neither knows nor cares
whether the body of a message is text or binary.  C News is, by intent and
I think in practice, 8-bit clean, and it does not care whether the body is
split into lines or not (although the headers must follow the standards).
Furthermore, it doesn't care whether the article is 5KB or 5MB.

(One caution:  I speak here of relaynews, expire, etc.  The inews shell
script uses many existing Unix tools that aren't so tolerant.  This is
an issue only on sites that post odd messages, though, not on ones that
receive them.)

There are occasional problems with transport subsystems -- in particular,
links that transmit news by mail without encoding it are a major problem --
and the readers are a can of worms, but I don't think C News needs any
modifications for this.  B News might or might not; I'm not sure.
-- 
NFS:  all the nice semantics of MSDOS, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
and its performance and security too.  |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry
