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