RFC 543

RFC 543 🎀 Network Journal Submission and Delivery 💖

Bestie, this is RFC 543! 🦋 It was written by D. Meyer at SRI-ARC (NIC 17777) and dated 31 July 1973. The title is Network Journal Submission and Delivery. The authors were at the Augmentation Research Center, Stanford Research Center, Menlo Park, California 94025. The header doesn't list a category, and it doesn't say what this RFC obsoletes or updates, so there's nothing else to report up top. 🌸

The on-line documentation lives at (userguides.journal-netsub,). and you can get hard copies from Marcia Keeney. 📚✨

The first implementation of a Network Journal Submission and Delivery system is now experimentally up, and it's giving main character energy 👑. It lets you use the NIC's NLS Journal System without ever entering NLS 🙈. Network users can submit text files they wrote on their host systems, using their mail subsystems (like SNDMSG, FTP, or TELNET) 💅. SRI-ARC then turns the mail into NLS files, journalizes them, and sends them to the recipients according to their preset Journal delivery options 🔥. There's also a brand-new option that lets you get automatic Journal delivery (citations to journalized documents) at your host through the Network mail protocol 🧚. Iconic.

Overview ✨

Okay so, network mail sent to SRI-ARC (NIC) gets entered into the NIC Journal system if a slash appears in the user-name 🫶. You can reach the NIC with the FTP, TELNET, or mail subsystem your local system gives you 💖.

The author's NIC Ident(s) go before the slash, and the recipients' NIC Ident(s) go after it. Idents get separated by spaces 🎀. (See scenarios in branch 3 🌈)

(e.g. jew / mdk dhc)

When the NIC detects this format, the Network Journal system gets invoked 🔥. At SRI-ARC, the mail becomes an NLS file, gets a unique catalog number, and is stored permanently under that number. Then a notice goes out to all the listed recipients 💜. If there's no slash, the mail is handled the normal way 🌸.

Journal citations can now be delivered over the Network, as well as to an NLS file at SRI-ARC and in hard copy 🦋. If you want your Journal mail delivered to your host computer, contact the NIC (see RFC510 -- 16400,) 💅. A more detailed description follows ✨.

NETWORK JOURNAL SUBMISSION 💖

The remote user writes up their Journal article on their host, using whatever tools they've got 🌸. For long articles, they can prep ahead in their text editor, like TECO if they're a TENEX user 📝. For short messages, the basic editing features (backspace character and line delete) that come with their submission subsystem are usually enough 🫶.

Connecting to the NIC 🔌

To get your mail to the SRI-ARC FTP server, you have to do one of these two things 🥺:

1. Through the FTP and TELNET mail subsystems, connect to SRI-ARC's FTP server process, then issue the FTP mail command, or
2. Use the mail subsystem your local system provides.

If you're using TENEX SNDMSG mail, put @nic at the end of the "User:" field 💕.

(e.g. jew / mdk dhc@nic)

Want to send the mail as a SNDMSG message to some people as well as submit it to the Journal? Treat the Journal form as one name, follow it with a comma, then list the other names SNDMSG knows about, separated by commas 💌.

(e.g. jew/mdk dhc@nic, meyer, white)

Specifying Authors and Recipients 🎀

You invoke Network Journal submission through your mail subsystem 📬. It gets triggered by a user-name field in this format:

author $(SP author) [SP] / [SP] recipient $ (SP recipient) [SP]
[ ; conversion algorithm]

   "$(..)" means "any number of occurrences, possibly
           zero, of what's inside the parentheses"
   "SP" means "space"
   "[..]" mean "the contents of the brackets are optional"

So basically: author(s), slash, recipient(s), an optional semicolon, and the conversion-algorithm 🧁.

e.g., jew/mdk rww cr dcs rww jcn / sri-arc ;h

An author is the NIC Ident of one of the people submitting the article 🙋‍♀️. A recipient is the Ident of one of the intended recipients. An Ident can point to either a "group" or an "individual" 🌈. SRI-ARC checks the idents, and if they're correct, it accepts the mail 💖. If an Ident is invalid, the mail gets rejected, you get an error message, and you have to start over 😭. The first author Ident is taken to be the clerk 👑.

If the SRI-ARC mail subsystem finds the slash in the user-name field, the Network Journal Submission system kicks in 🔥. Otherwise, the mail gets treated as normal Network mail and delivered to the directory named in the user-name 📁.

Specifying an NLS Conversion Algorithm 🧚

This part is optional 🌸. The sender can choose the algorithm that converts their sequential message file to NLS format by inserting ; conversion algorithm anywhere in the user-name field (for example, jew/mdk rww;s) 💅. For SNDMSG, put it before the @nic 🫶.

These are the legal values for conversion-algorithm:

• s -- Insert Sequential, each line an NLS statement (this is the default conversion-algorithm) 🍓
• a -- Insert Assembler with structure 🧩
• m -- Insert Assembler without structure 🧩
• h -- Heuristic Insert Sequential, double <CR>s indicating end of statements, assuming no right justification in the source file ✨
• j -- Heuristic Insert Sequential, double <CR>s indicating end of statements, assuming right justification in the source file (for those who put multiple spaces between words to line up the right margin, multiple spaces will be removed) 💜

When we say "Heuristic Insert Sequential," we mean that the Insert Sequential algorithm tries to be smarter about statements and levels 🧠. Statements are separated by two carriage returns in a row 🎀. The statement's level depends on how much it's indented. If it's indented more than the previous statement, it becomes a substatement and drops down a level. If it's the same indentation as the previous statement, it stays on the same level 💖. If it's indented less than the previous statement, the program looks back for an earlier statement with the same indentation and puts it at that level 🌈. A statement's indentation is taken from either its first or second line, whichever is less. That way paragraph indentation gets ignored, for example 🫶. This works from 1 to 12 levels 👑. Carriage returns at the end of full lines (within 10 characters of the right margin, i.e. the 62nd column) get replaced by spaces 🦋.

Honestly, this algorithm is an attempt to answer a very hard need 🥹. It won't always do the exact right thing, but it should often give the result you meant 💅. Experiment with it! Suggestions are welcome 💌.

Titling the Message 🌷

Once the conversion is done, you can give your message an optional title. The title gets signaled by the label re:, title:, or subject:, and the system searches for it in the first statement of the message text 🔍. The label can be all upper case, all lower case, or have the first character upper case and the rest lower case 🎀. If the label shows up anywhere in the statement, the title is the line from the first non-blank character after the label up to the first carriage return (and line feed), or to the end of the statement if there's no carriage return 💖. Then the statement containing the title gets deleted from the file, and any substructure moves up a level 🧚.

The submission is equivalent to the NLS 'Submit Message' command if the NLS file (after the title statement, if there is one, has been deleted) has only one statement in it besides the origin statement. In that case, the whole message gets delivered as part of the Journal citation 🚨. Otherwise, the Network submission is equivalent to 'Submit File', and only a reference to the Journal document gets delivered to each of the recipients 💌.

NETWORK JOURNAL DELIVERY ✨

okay so there are three ways NLS users can get their Journal mail, and you can pick just one or mix a few together 💅

1. ONLINE 🌸: an entry with the text of the mail or, for longer items, a citation to it, gets put in the user's initial file. That file lives in their directory at SRI-ARC.
2. HARDCOPY 📮: the text of the mail gets sent to the user, to whatever address they choose, through the U.S. Postal Service.
3. NETWORK 🌐: Journal mail gets delivered over the Net to a host and mailbox the user picks. If you want this one, tell the NIC and give them your host name and mailbox. 🫶

Short messages ('Submit Message') get delivered in full to the remote user, with the usual header showing author, date and time, citation number, and title. it's giving classic 🎀

JEW 4-APR-73 11:21  15490
SMFS Runs on TENEX 1.31 at the NIC
Message: Dave-- The NIC came up on TENEX 1.31 on
1-APR...

Bigger Journal articles ('Submit File') get a citation instead, and it looks like this 🦋

JEW 4-APR-73 17:51  15491
Farming Batch Work out to UCSB -- A Scenario
Location: SRI-ARC <MJOURNAL> 15491.NLSXNLS

The link you'd see in ONLINE delivery gets swapped out here for a host name (SRI-ARC) and a pathname to the file on that host. With those, the remote user, or a process running for them, can grab a copy of the file from SRI-ARC FTP. The ;XNLS parameter tells SRI-ARC's FTP server process to convert the NLS file to sequential form (using a default conversion algorithm) before it goes out to the user over the Net. 🔥

---

Network Journal delivery works through the FTP mail command. Mail goes to a host (meaning its FTP server process) and a mailbox address that the user chooses 📬

These two parameters are kept in the NIC Ident file for every user who picks NETWORK delivery. Like the delivery mode itself, they can be viewed or changed from the Ident System in NLS 💜 Starting values for host and mailbox address were asked for from the Network community (see RFC 510 -- 16400,).

The Network Journal submission and delivery in this doc is a first-cut, so it's not the final form 🧚 A more flexible and slightly cleaner user interface is planned once the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), which both implementations depend on, gets revised to handle mail delivery, forwarding, and recording more clearly (see RFC 524 -- 15146,1). ✨

[This RFC was put into machine readable form for entry] [into the online RFC archives by Via Genie 12/99]