>> I must admit I wasn't aware that URLs of the form "news://host/article"
>> were "forbidden";
>
>They aren't in the spec. They were proposed on the URI group and
>were called "nntp:" not "news".
Does this suggest that the form, <nntp://hostname/article> is now "legal"
and its use is encouraged ?
>The higher principles are *not* that that one should migrate, but that
>one should use NNTP for broadcast and HTTP for individual retrieval,
>and that one should have a consistent model of reference before
>defining new URIs.
No desire here to proliferate new URI's. However there is the concept
of multicast (aka private newsgroups or mail lists). It is not individual,
but not broadcast either. The above URI, along with a nice viewer/poster
would address this. The purpose of the URI is to be able to reference
(within some context, such as a common mail list or local news group)
articles that are posted.
The "news" method (sans hostname) would then still be the right choice
for global, broadcast articles, where the author that used the URI
not be concerned with how the viewer obtains his local view of the article.
Mike
------------------------------------
Michael A. Dolan - miked@cerfnet.com
TerraByte Technology (619) 445-9070