On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 03:11:23PM -0700, Kurt Cagle wrote: > While I think that the commentary on NNTP is essentially correct -- we are > rebuilding the foundation of NNTP, I want to raise a couple of issues that > may justify just WHY such a rebuilding is necessary. > > I started working with NNTP back in 1992 ... it was in fact my first > experience with the Internet, prior in fact to HTTP/HTML. At the time, NNTP > was small, largely free, was run by a coterie of competent amateurs for the > love of the medium and was very much devoted to handling the issues > associated with maintaining threading across the boundaries of the nascent > Internet.
Please note that you're conflating NNTP (a transport mechanism) and Usenet (a messaging network which is transported by, *among other things*, NNTP). > In a decade, the threats that have been lingering at the edge of e-mail has > pretty much devoured NNTP. NNTP is difficult to moderate, difficult to > search, difficult to archive, difficult to set up. If you want NNTP access, > you often have to pay extra from your ISP, and there is no guarantee that > the newsgroups that YOU need are going to be available via the server. The > bulk of material circulating on Usenet is porn span, sent not by legitimate > users of the servers but by companies that seem to feel that extreme (and > typically disgusting) acts of sexual display will drive people to their > sites. The high volume and poor archiving formats also insure that > newsgroups are short memory archives at best. Finally, the role of the web > has changed enough that most people are simply not aware that Usenet exists, > even in those cases where it is available. You're assuming that I meant that you should become part of Usenet, and I wasn't. I was merely observing that, for the category of message transport that appeared to be in question, it seemed that NNTP was a better mechanism than RSS. *Some* of the things you want to move around *would* be better served by RSS, but not forum traffic -- which I understood to be the issue on point; was I wrong? > Contrast that to what's going on with the current Drupal modules and RSS > syndication. I've written chapters in a couple of books on RSS, and > consequently have had a lot of chance to think about what exactly this > medium is. RSS is significant in that it provides a way to aggregate links > and associate that aggregation with some form of editorial filtering and > annotation. Why is that important? In great part because it is a function > which currently is not done very well within the confines of web pages. Many > web pages contain links and editorial content on those links, but in most > cases such information is not terribly filterable, is reliant upon > webmasters remaining on top of their link pages on a regular basis > (something that very seldom occurs in practice) and such feeds cannot be > merged together to provide a large stream of aggregation. In other words, > the meta-content that Web Pages are able to offer are far less than what RSS > can do. Stipulated. But off my point. > A Drupal node can be thought of as a distributor of RSS feeds of varying > types, which may or may not also be a transport mechanism for content > itself. In most cases RSS is most efficient when the only payload > information it does carry is abstracts of contents and linkages, perhaps > with enough overhead in terms of production dates and authors to allow > verification systems to work effectively. Precisely -- and it sounded to me like people were talking about syndicating *the user comments themselves* -- for which is it manifestly not suitable. > RSS abstracts and categories can be archived and persisted, can be formatted > any number of different ways with relatively little work and because of its > XML base works well in web services environments. You don't need a > specialized server to use it, which isn't true of NNTP, and you aren't > dependent upon having to go through a community process to create a new > newsgroup, minimizing the alt.* phenomenon. You don't need a specialized server to use RSS? I'm not sure I believe that's an accurate charaterization at either end, but certainly not at the receiving end... And if you're running *your own servers*, then the latter problem isn't an issue either. And if you were running your own top-level (dean.*), then it wouldn't be an issue anyway if you could get people to carry it -- but I wasn't really suggesting that. In this day and age of NNTP client retrieval, it's not as necessary to do that sort of thing as it was in the days when propagation was an issue. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth [EMAIL PROTECTED] Member of the Technical Staff Baylink RFC 2100 The Suncoast Freenet The Things I Think Tampa Bay, Florida http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 OS X: Because making Unix user-friendly was easier than debugging Windows -- Simon Slavin, on a.f.c
