Subject: #1299 Richard Clayton's comments

From: Harald Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2006 06:51:20 -0700

In reviewing Richard Clayton's comments, I find only one substantive 
issue: That of whether or not we need to add definitions for the words 
"generate" and "inject", or his long list:

        generate

        inject

        posted to

        accept

        moderate

        supplied

        passing on

        make available to

        exchange with

        submit

        create

        process

        send to

        mailed

        expired

        relay

        filed

        enter

I suggest that if we need it, we add to 1.5:

Generate: An agent is said to "generate" an article or a header if it did not exist before the agent generated it. Examples are when an user agent generates a message from text and addressing information supplied by an user, or when a news server generates an "Injection-Info" header for a newly posted message.

Most of the other words have distinct meanings, I think; "posted to" is mentioned under the definition of "newsgroup" - this could be broken out as a more visible definition, since it's a pretty important concept.

Is it reasonable to replace all occurences of "injection" with "posting"? Or should we define "injection" as a synonym for "posting"?

                           Harald

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From: Richard Clayton <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2006 15:21:12 +0100

In message <[email-masked]>, Harald Alvestrand
<[email-masked]> writes
>issue: 

I'd draw attention to my comment on User-Agent. I suggested removing all
the fancy ABNF and leaving it as free form text (because that's the way
the world is when you're advertising your products). Charles did say it
had been copied from HTTP ... but there people (as opposed to machines)
don't see it -- so the incentives are very different.

>That of whether or not we need to add definitions for the words 

The list was intended to indicate what a mess it currently was.

I think it would be better to try and only use the words that have been
defined...  and the simplest way of doing this is to stop using
different words for identical things. I am NOT in favour of adding 25
extra definitions just to make a few sentences flow better.

Only allowing the use of defined words should properly concentrate
peoples minds on the exactness of those definitions, which need to be
clear about what changes are made as the article is moved from one state
to another.  It's whether or not things can be expected to be changed
that I found unclear.

If the specification of that changing is in another document then the
few mentions of changes and proto-articles and stuff that are in this
document should be removed.

- -- 
richard                                                   Richard Clayton

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary 
Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. Benjamin Franklin 11 Nov 1755

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From: Russ Allbery <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2006 09:04:59 -0700

> don't see it -- so the incentives are very different.

User-Agent has already been fairly successfully deployed in the wild and
the uses of it that I've seen actually follow the specification, or at
least are within the typical degree of varience.  Given that, I think we
should keep the tight specification; it doesn't seem widely disobeyed in
practice, and there's no reason to throw away the parsability when it's
not causing a problem IMO.

> extra definitions just to make a few sentences flow better.

I generally agree with the thought; I'm just not sure the rewrite effort
is worth it.

> document should be removed.

The split between the documents is certainly tricky.  It has the definite
advantage of keeping the format specification (which is what people are
going to refer to the most) far simpler and more straightforward, but it
means that the format specification really doesn't describe the *process*
of posting a Usenet article (since we can't get into that without dragging
in all of the other machinery).

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email-masked])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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From: Harald Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2006 22:55:37 +0200

Richard Clayton wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----
I'm sympathetic to the idea of using fewer words. However, we have 
settled on using a rather free-form specification lanugage called 
"English", which means that we generally use many, many words that do 
not have definitions anywhere near the document.

I picked on "generate" and "inject" because "generate" has been worried 
about before, while "inject" may be a synonym for something else that we 
have defined.

I'm not sure how much value there is to hunting through the document for 
*all* the terms where a defined word can be used instead of the word 
currently used.

                    Harald