Why the special character restriction?

[Bill Davidsen]

Anne Wilson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> As some of you might know, we're testing the use of INN to relay data in 
> near real time.  It's working great - INN is a great package that works 
> well and has lots of really nice features.  (If you'd like to see the 
> stats see 
> http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/projects/nldm/relayStats/plotStats.php.)
> 
> But, I still get asked a question for which I have no good answer.  Why 
> the continued restriction on special characters in the message body? 
> Why can't the message body just be a black box?

Because usenet is a network for moving messages to human readers, and 
all the binary stuff was added as a hack, and in retrospect was a bad 
idea. I can say that, I was the moderator of a binary group.

Putting arbitrary bytes in a message is likely to make some reader very 
unhappy, and is not a desirable thing to do. Encodings like yENC are one 
approach to this.

Usenet is probably not the optimal tool for this, and that's unlikely to 
change. You may have some modified tools which handle pure binary, but 
they are unlikely to become universal in a useful timeframe.

> 
> It's not a big deal for us to do a simple encoding because we visit 
> every byte of a data product anyway in order to compute a signature. 
> But, if we didn't want to compute a signature the cost of encoding would 
> be much harder to swallow.
> 
> Anne


-- 
    -bill davidsen (davidsen at tmr.com)
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
  last possible moment - but no longer"  -me