New Netnews protocol draft

Over the past month, I've been working on a revision and counter-proposal to the current Netnews protocol draft in the Usenet Article Format IETF working group. We've mostly finished the basic format and now need to finish the protocol, and I was asked to write a new version of the current draft so that we can compare the results of a different editorial style to the current draft.

I submitted my draft to the draft editor yesterday, and you can also get it off my web site. I haven't had a chance to wrap any nice pages around it yet, or in general update a lot of my IETF-related web pages for the current status of things (such as the publication of all of the NNTP RFCs).

Going through the complete protocol draft gave me a different perspective on several problems and turned up a few nice solutions to things that I previously didn't know how to deal with. I don't agree with Charles's decisions on features and on wording focus, but he has done a great job of precisely describing a lot of technical behavior. We'll see what happens from here.

This has taken around twenty-five hours over the past month, maybe more, so it's a relief to get it done with and out there. I've already warned people that going forward I'm not willing to devote more than two hours a week. I have way too many other things to do. But I do think the exercise was worthwhile, even if we don't adopt my draft as the new WG document, since I managed to explain and find a lot of things about the protocol that needed attention and the draft can now be mined for wording.