USEFOR progress

Finally. Andrew Gierth and Pete Resnick are taking over as chairs of the working group and posted their road map for going forward, which involves splitting the current monster draft into four documents.

One will specify the article format, akin to RFC 2822. Another will specify the interpretation of the messages on the wire, the roles of various agents in the process, and all the other stuff that goes into Usenet like relaying posts to moderators and processing control messages. Both of those documents will be standards-track.

The third document will be an informational RFC about best practices for software, moving all the "Ought" stuff out of the current draft. This is an excellent move.

The fourth document will be an Experimental protocol for supporting internationalized newsgroup names, thereby getting the single most controversial proposal out of the critical path into its own document where proponents of UTF-8 can propose their solution without it necessarily being the only permissible solution. This is excellent.

I'm very, very happy. I really feel like the first two documents, which are the ones that I'm really interested in as an implementor, have a real chance of getting done now without including a bunch of unnecessary, untested cruft or getting bogged down in endless arguments about new work.

The timeframe is very aggressive, and I want to find as much time as I can to help. We might actually get both a new NNTP standard and a new article format standard by the end of the year.