Re: [syndication] Alternate delivery mechanisms for RSS

[Julian Bond <julian@netmarketseurope.com>]

In article <OE34srZndN8dtdCV5dQ000018b1@hotmail.com>, Bill Kearney
<wkearney99@hotmail.com> writes
>That said, it seems to me there still needs to be a way to uniquely tag an
>article.  In recalling usenet (NNTP) the hassle was a bookmark to a news
>article was usually news server specific.  No two NNTP servers would have the
>same ID info on a message.  Therefor I couldn't send a news:// url to others
>unless there were on the same NNTP server.

AFAIK, The NNTP case was actually the reverse. There are a whole class
of NNTP servers out there which are broken and won't return an article
by Article ID. Go read the RFC. NNTP is an extremely elegant protocol
for distributed servers. It became abused when the alt.binaries
hierarchy appeared, but for plain old ascii text it's very good at slow
motion distribution. 

A typical Message ID header looks like this
Message-ID: <3A9F43B9.700EDAD2@pop.spkn.qwest.net>
and *is* globally unique as long as the server at the insertion point is
RFC compliant.

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