- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Sun, 8 Mar 1998 10:26:34 +0000 (GMT)
- To: phil@netscape.com (Phil Peterson)
- Cc: lynx-dev@sig.net, uri@Bunyip.Com, chuckop@microsoft.com
> > > but Netscape destroyed the distinction > > between nntp and new and I think that has now been officially sanctioned. > > I don't understand what distinction we destroyed. Would you care to say > more about that? news: refers to the global (message-id) namespace of USENET, whereas nntp refers to the local NNTP (article number) namespace of a named server. Navigator, but not MSIE started using news: for both, with the result that, with the proliferation of isolated NNTP systems, a lot of people providing product support through the NNTP protocol started to use news: instead of nntp: and effectively locked out clients other than Netscape. Effectively news: assumes real push technology, where the articles are pushed out to every *USENET* server in the world, whereas nntp: assumed that you pulled from the home server. My understanding is that the nntp: functionality has now been merged with news: to bring the standards into line with the de facto position. In some ways this is like LDAP v3 v X.500, in that again one unified distributed system is being replaced by lots of islands, for which you need to know the server before you can connect.
Received on Monday, 9 March 1998 02:58:39 UTC