NTTP retrieval problem, was: support for setext, the structure-enhanced text format, in WWW
Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@www3.cern.ch>
Date: Mon, 3 May 93 13:19:36 +0100
From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@www3.cern.ch>
Message-id: <9305031219.AA11797@www3.cern.ch>
To: pflynn@curia.ucc.ie (Peter Flynn)
Subject: NTTP retrieval problem, was: support for setext, the structure-enhanced text format, in WWW
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Reply-To: timbl@nxoc01.cern.ch
Peter,
Your www program is not contacting a www server at all. When the
document address specifies "news:..." the it talks NNTP.
NNTP says nothing about how articles are stored, but allows
one to ask for them by Message-id. Sounds like your newsreader
doesn't have the articles. There should be an error message.
Try
www -v news:a7fd5104@random.se
to see what is going on.
Begin forwarded message:
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
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