Reading news via WWW browsers

marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Date: Mon, 1 Mar 93 10:04:08 -0800
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9303011804.AA14688@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
To: gss@iil.intel.com (Sheaffer Gad)
Cc: TONYJ@scs.slac.stanford.edu, gss@iil.intel.com, marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu,
        wei@xcf.berkeley.edu, www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Reading news via WWW browsers
In-reply-to: <9303011118.AA63399@ilx051>
References: <9303011118.AA63399@ilx051>
X-Md4-Signature: e0415b599af5fd8a17529647b6d71e6f

Sheaffer Gad writes:
>     Using the same indexing method as TIN, it will embed a link into
>     the end of each article that will point to the next one in the
>     thread, in addition to links in the beginning of the article
>     that point to the previous article in the thread and to the
>     start of the thread.
> 
>     Also having a menu of threads instead of a menu of postings at
>     the news group entrance, makes the menu more compact and the
>     access more convenient.

Good idea!  I can't wait to see your code... :-).

(I agree that TIN is the best newsreader I've seen so far in terms of
threading, etc. -- would be a good place to steal code from, if it's
legal.)

> 2 - The newsreader part should in my opinion be part of WWW, not the browser.
>     That way the effort will not be duplicated in each and every
>     browser. In the same way that WWW uses gophers and WAIS servers,
>     it can use distributed news servers, that know how to feed it
>     hypertext.

Except these hypertext news servers don't exist yet.  Again, can't
wait to see the code... (also, would be a pain in the butt to get the
current NNTP servers moved over to the new code -- probably better to
just rely on existing servers until the whole news population moves to
the next level of functionality -- and who knows, maybe that will be
hypertext).

> 3 - Is there a way to read news groups not carried locally via the WWW ?
>     We have here a rather limited selection on newsgroups (only 1500
>     or so :-) Some people are not that fortunate, and I know of many
>     groups we do not carry either. Additionally, postings are kept
>     here only for about 3 days.
>     
>     So - how about a facility to read news at the source?

Well, there's no such thing even in the news world itself, so I don't
know how we can do any better...

> 4 - At least in viola there is no way to save locally a news article, thread
>     or any remote file (sort of FTP it over). How about other
>     browsers ?

Mosaic lets you save/mail/print the current document (article), in
HTML, plaintext, or formatted text.  I'm not up to date on the other
browsers anymore.

Cheers,
Marc

--
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu