the mindless discussion can end

Kevin Altis (kevin@scic.intel.com)
Fri, 8 Oct 1993 16:07:48 -0800

My original posting was intended to get us away from a perpetually broken
mail server (if possible) without having to deal with the noise level of
c.i.w3. My mail tool is better for filtering than my News tool, so I would
just as well stay with a mailing list as long as it works.

At 2:26 PM 10/8/93 -0700, Bill Janssen wrote:
>Of course, this news vs. mail discussion seems really narrow-minded.
>WWW should certainly have a completely different mechanism, based on
>http and a special server, that combines the *best* of news and mail
>*and* includes a searchable archive, thread linking, and annotations.
>More like free Notes.

Bill gets credit for starting this one...
On the subject of a special WWW server combining the best of news and mail
we can do it today given a publically writeable area (either directly or
via one or more servers) and working group annotations. People could post
text, some rich text format or text/html and replies would be annotations
with URL links to other messages and a periodically updated WAIS index...
Might even be a good test of some of the URN ideas since the server could
generate unique ids for messages as they come in and the whole lot could be
distributed across several sites.

ka