Many netnews groups have archives, special collections, or associated
gopher, wais, or world wide web servers that go along with them.
Current network information about these resources is scattered hither
and yon, in FAQ files, in archie, in wais, etc. etc. If you don't
know what you are looking for it can be mighty tricky to find it,
and in many cases its more work than it should be.
I'd like to propose a standard "home page" format (probably a DTD, eh?)
for a newsgroup. At the very minimum this could be automatically
generated from the great big lists of newsgroups. With more work
it would systematically and regularly collect information about
groups, so that readers coming on new could get up to speed fast,
or so that long-suffering netheads could help guide new people to
the "right" group.
I've put together a tagged file format for a newsgroup description.
It's not HTML (not presentation oriented) but it should be straightforward
to munch on it to turn it into HTML. I'll send copies to anyone
who is willing to send back a similarly tagged version of their
favorite group.
thanks