Re: Re WIT

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Date: Tue, 14 Jun 1994 06:01:41 +0200
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From: miked@CERF.NET (Michael A. Dolan)
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: Re WIT
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At 06:24 PM 6/13/94 +0000, Brian Behlendorf wrote:
>On Tue, 14 Jun 1994, Michael A. Dolan wrote:
>>         1. Offline composition - unless I missed something, it appears
>>         that one must be connected semi-live to the various WIT forms
>>         in order to have a meaningful session.  Of course one could
>>         cut and paste, but...
>
>Well, in the Web (tm) there's really no difference between online and
>offline composition - when you download a form and fill it out you're not
>still connected to the machine from whence it came, so it doesn't matter 
>of you take 5 minutes or 5 days to fill it out.

By "connected", I meant locally connected to the Internet, not TCP connected
to the httpd.  Current browser technology does not lend itself to browsing
large, linked chunks and then disconnecting from your local
favorite service provider and fooling around with it, then reconnecting
to the service provider and uploading the (potentially multiple forms).
It all currently presumes a full time (local) Internet connection.  This
may in the future go away with ISDN, but for now, it's a problem for
those that pay by the minute.  Email programs only recently figured this
out.

>If it's easy to allow users to collapse trees and move certain posts back
>to a top level when the discussion has progressed significantly from the
>original topic, then that would be great for most purposes...

That would do nicely.

>if someone doesn't have the
>capability to view something on W3, why are they participating in a
>discussion about improving it?
>.....
>Anyways, it's not hard to forward all new posts in a given topic to a given
>list...

I'd be more inclined to want to post via email rather than view via email.
One can think of WITing as two tasks - viewing and posting.  Viewing via the
web is the way to go, however W3 client posting technology is still
lagging and (for now) one may wish to post via another means.  I suggested
email since everyone has their own favorite, fuzzy composer.

I like WIT a lot.  But in some ways it is re-inventing NNTP.  I hate to
ask but I will....has anyone considered using private news groups via NNTP
and writing a nice W3 news reader/poster ?  I'm sure there are things that it
might limit it, but perhaps an NNTP extension or two would be a better
path ?  Don't get me wrong - I want a "WIT-like thing", but I'm just thinking
about how it could be more widely used and require less invention.
Using NNTP would require news URL's to handle a hostname, though (Tim - are
you listening ?  :-)

>Eudora is horrible......

I'll spare everyone a mailer war here. :-)

        Mike
------------------------------------
Michael A. Dolan - miked@cerfnet.com 
TerraByte Technology (619) 445-9070