NetNews standardization

Current standards

NetNews is documented in RFC 977, which describes the NNTP protocol, and in RFC 1036, which describes the article format (RFC 822 with special headers), control messages and so on.

This does not describe all features of the current state of NetNews art, but IETF working groups that try to standardize these issues have tended to close down after a relatively unproductive series of discussions.

Nonetheless, we are going to try again; an IETF WG for NNTP is being started up in the fall of 1996, chaired by Stan Barber and Erik Fair.

Ongoing work

According to tal@big.att.com (Tom Limoncelli), in a letter to ietf-822 on November 15, 1994:

Henry Spencer is working on son-of-rfc1036. This is going to codify the article format as now used, and add a couple things to make it tighter. it is in the zoo.toronto.edu archive - as "news.ps.Z" and "news.txt.Z".

There is no *active* NNTP group. However, Rich $alz is working on an RFC to document the common extensions to NNTP. Currently, one would have to read the man pages to INN and NNTP-t6 and extract the various extensions.

A much more interesting site than this one for NNTP stuff is Stan Barber's site which also gives details of the proposed NNTP group.
Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no
Last modified: Tue Aug 13 09:40:14 1996