s-o-1036 June 1994

2.3. Definitions

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

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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

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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".