Not a www-html matter (Re: Upgrading the news URL)

[This is actually off-remit; apologies for not following up to a more
appropriate forum.]

On Mon, 10 Mar 1997, Dan Fabulich wrote:

> I was considering adding to the existing "news:" URL, such that it would
> allow links to a particular byte range within the body of a given post.
> It would be something like this:
> 
> news:<message-id>@host/243-300

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that some news hosts
require users to log in. Hence using the <message-id>@host would be a
silly idea, since we already need the format
<URL:news://userid:password@host:port/> in the same way that ftp etc.
works.

It could be done in a different way, by defining a new scheme which might
work something like:

scheme-name://users:pass@host:port/--message-id-standard-url-encoded/lines/

However I don't think that's all that useful. For a start, it's very
machine-based (rather than human-based), since it uses the message-id
rather than giving the newsgroup. For a second, it would mean that all the
perfectly acceptable newsreaders out there would break, because people
would start trying to inline references by doing something cunning with
EMBED.

Anyway, that's more than enough for the wrong list ...
James

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  James Aylett - Crystal Services (crystal.clare.cam.ac.uk): BBS, Ftp and Web
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Received on Monday, 10 March 1997 19:00:10 UTC