Re: Revisting NNTP?

["Bill Kearney" <wkearney99@hotmail.com>]

> Can you propose what the NNTP messages/organization would look 
like? In
> other words, what are the newgroups, what goes in the message, what 
is
> attached. I'm having trouble getting a handle on this.

Well, if consider how news items are shown at newsisfree you get a 
similar idea.  newsisfree, by the way, rocks.  But instead of showing 
a portal box with the feed title and lines beneath, I'd create one 
NNTP newsgroup for each feed and put the line items as one message 
each.  Yes, horribly inefficient as much would be just a single 
line.  But I'd be able to use the NNTP client interfaces to search, 
sort, print, and forward them with much more flexibility than is 
found at a portal site.  And given than many RSS feeds have more than 
just a single line of text (Hi Scoble and Curry) the text messages 
would be a bit more readable that just a dumb line.

Also worth considering is a simple amount of HTML.  Many NNTP readers 
support making inlined URLs live without real HTML wrappers so this 
is of varying importance.

Then it seems reasonable to consider attaching the XML that created 
the message via MIME.  Either attach the entire feed or just enough 
to describe that one item.

Seems like a very good way to accomplish a number of goals.  One 
being the creation of a repository of newsfeed items.  The other 
being to provide a powerful and flexible interface without creating 
one from scratch.  A side benefit is the very large amount of search 
and indexing engines available that understand NNTP storage.

Is that clearer?  Again, I'm open to debate on this.

-Bill Kearney