Son-of-RFC1036:[Previous][Up to Table of Contents] [Next]
The term "character set", wherever it is used in this Draft,
refers to a coded character set, in the sense of ISO charac-
ter set standardization work, and must not be misinterpreted
as meaning merely "a set of characters".
In this Draft, ASCII character 32 is referred to as "blank";
the word "space" has a more generic meaning.
An "article" is the unit of news, analogous to a MAIL "mes-
sage".
A "poster" is a human being (or software equivalent) submit-
ting a possibly-compliant article to be "posted": made
available for reading on all relevant hosts. A "posting
agent" is software that assists posters to prepare articles,
including determining whether the final article is compli-
ant, passing it on to a relayer for posting if so, and
returning it to the poster with an explanation if not. A
"relayer" is software which receives allegedly-compliant
articles from posting agents and/or other relayers, files
copies in a "news database", and possibly passes copies on
to other relayers.
NOTE: While the same software may well function
both as a relayer and as part of a posting agent,
the two functions are distinct and should not be
confused. The posting agent's purpose is (in
part) to validate an article, supply header infor-
mation that can or should be supplied automati-
cally, and generally take reasonable actions in an
attempt to transform the poster's submission into
a compliant article. The relayer's purpose is to
move already-compliant articles around efficiently
without damaging them.
A "reader" is a human being reading news articles. A "read-
ing agent" is software which presents articles to a reader.
NOTE: Informal usage often uses "reader" for both
these meanings, but this introduces considerable
potential for confusion and misunderstanding, so
this Draft takes care to make the distinction.
A "newsgroup" is a single news forum, a logical bulletin
board, having a name and nominally intended for articles on
a specific topic. An article is "posted to" a single news-
group or several newsgroups. When an article is posted to
more than one newsgroup, it is said to be "cross-posted";
note that this differs from posting the same text as part of
each of several articles, one per newsgroup. A "hierarchy"
is the set of all newsgroups whose names share a first com-
ponent (see the name syntax in section 5.5).
A newsgroup may be "moderated", in which case submissions
are not posted directly, but mailed to a "moderator" for
consideration and possible posting. Moderators are typi-
cally human but may be implemented partially or entirely in
software.
A "followup" is an article containing a response to the con-
tents of an earlier article (the followup's "precursor"). A
"followup agent" is a combination of reading agent and post-
ing agent that aids in the preparation and posting of a fol-
lowup.
Text comparisons are "case-sensitive" if they consider
uppercase letters (e.g. "A") different from lowercase let-
ters (e.g. "a"), and "case-insensitive" if letters differing
only in case (e.g. "A" and "a") are considered identical.
Categories of text are said to be case-(in)sensitive if com-
parisons of such texts to others are case-(in)sensitive.
A "cooperating subnet" is a set of news-exchanging hosts
which is sufficiently well-coordinated (typically via a cen-
tral administration of some sort) that stronger assumptions
can be made about hosts in the set than about news hosts in
general. This is typically used to relax restrictions which
are otherwise required for worst-case interoperability; mem-
bers of a cooperating subnet MAY interchange articles that
do not conform to this Draft's specifications, provided all
members have agreed to this and provided the articles are
not permitted to leak out of the subnet. The word "subnet"
is used to emphasize that a cooperating subnet is typically
not an isolated universe; care must be taken that traffic
leaving the subnet complies with the restrictions of the
larger net, not just those of the cooperating subnet.
A "message ID" is a unique identifier for an article, usu-
ally supplied by the posting agent which posted it. It dis-
tinguishes the article from every other article ever posted
anywhere (in theory). Articles with the same message ID are
treated as identical copies of the same article even if they
are not in fact identical.
A "gateway" is software which receives news articles and
converts them to messages of some other kind (e.g. mail to a
mailing list), or vice-versa; in essence it is a translating
relayer that straddles boundaries between different methods
of message exchange. The most common type of gateway
connects newsgroup(s) to mailing list(s), either unidirec-
tionally or bidirectionally, but there are also gateways
between news networks using this Draft's news format and
those using other formats.
A "control message" is an article which is marked as con-
taining control information; a relayer receiving such an
article will (subject to permissions etc.) take actions
beyond just filing and passing on the article.
NOTE: "Control article" would be more consistent
terminology, but "control message" is already well
established.
An article's "reply address" is the address to which mailed
replies should be sent. This is the address specified in
the article's From header (see section 5.2), unless it also
has a Reply-To header (see section 6.3).
The notation (e.g.) "(ASCII 17)" following a name means
"this name refers to the ASCII character having value 17".
An "ASCII printable character" is an ASCII character in the
range 33-126. An "ASCII control character" is an ASCII
character in the range 0-31, or the character DEL (ASCII
127). A "non-ASCII character" is a character having a value
exceeding 127.
NOTE: Blank is neither an "ASCII printable charac-
ter" nor an "ASCII control character".