Re: support for setext, the structure-enhanced text format, in WWW

pflynn@curia.ucc.ie (Peter Flynn)
Date: Mon, 3 May 93 11:03:37 BST
From: pflynn@curia.ucc.ie (Peter Flynn)
Subject: Re: support for setext, the structure-enhanced text format, in WWW
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Message-id: <9305031003.AA05900@curia.ucc.ie>
X-Envelope-To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch

Ian writes:

>   forgive me for barging in on like this, infrequent listener on
>   this list that I am, but I'd like you to cast an eye on a dis-
>   cussion now underway in alt.hypertext, comp.text.sgml and several
>   other crossposted groups, which may be of interest in regard to
>   adding an ability to the WWW line-browser to recognize and access
>   _implicitly_coded_ anchors in otherwise plaintext documents (the
>   setext graphic markup method).
>
>     Try this first:
>
> news:a7fd5104@random.se       18K, 309 lines
> news:a800bb38@random.se       24K, 507 lines
>
>     else
>
> file://ftp.ifi.uio.no/pub/SGML/comp.text.sgml/by.msgid/a7fd5104@random.se
> file://ftp.ifi.uio.no/pub/SGML/comp.text.sgml/by.msgid/a800bb38@random.se
>

I have found a problem in retrieving news thru both www (linemode) and
xmosaic. Both correctly pick up my news server name, and if I follow the
links from `By Type' thru `Network News' to a specific group, both programs
correctly list the articles, but cannot access the article texts, giving
me instead the message `Connecting to NewsHost ...' and then coming back
with `Back, Quit or Help:'

It is clear that both programs are expecting articles to be stored in files
with names set to the message-id. I have never encountered a system which
does this, and my own server runs plain vanilla nntp and Cnews, which puts
articles in files whose names are the article numbers (sequential, 1+).

As the www server is capable of finding the directory (and is presumably
grepping for 'Subject:' and piping the results back into HTML---or is it
actually opening each file in turn?) could not a simple addition to the code
see if the files are named (=message-ID) or numbered (=message-number) and
act accordingly?

If this is not possible, where do I find a news system which stores articles
under message-ID filenames instead?

///Peter