Re: more WWW/WAIS gateway hacks

Tim Berners-Lee (timbl)
Fri, 27 Mar 92 09:58:11 GMT+0100 

Date: Fri, 27 Mar 92 09:58:11 GMT+0100
From: timbl (Tim Berners-Lee)
Message-Id: <9203270858.AA24800@ nxoc01.cern.ch >
To: Edward Vielmetti <emv@msen.com>
Subject: Re: more WWW/WAIS gateway hacks
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch

From: Edward Vielmetti <emv@msen.com>
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 92 00:07:40 -0500

(I'm going to have to get the WWW gateway up and running myself.)

	Sound like a good idea, Ed!  Especially no I've released it
	"properly" :-)

Here's a thought to make WWW/WAIS gateways for netnews even more
useful than they already are.

Some WAIS db's are really db's full of news articles.  comp.archives
is one, there's collections of current comp.sys.* and sci.* groups,
etc etc.

The WWW approach to news articles is really cool cause it builds links
based on embedded message ID's, links on the newsgroups: line, stuff
like that.

If you could somehow note (maybe on a per-gateway basis?  it might
not be possible to discern on the fly, so you'd perhaps configure
it ahead of time) that the texts coming back from a WAIS server were
really news articles instead of arbitrary globs of texts, and theny
you added the set of news-parsing stuff, you'd have a big win on your
hands.

(eg. try
	<a href=wais://wais.oit.unc.edu:210/comp-sys?jpeg> jpeg in comp.sys </a>
and explain why you can't chain back to things from there.)

will get the code and see what I can do to add this.

--Ed

	Two ideas here. One is to add a "MailNews" RFC850/822 message type
	which switches on client message parsing.  The other is to have a
	converter in the gateway which offes the message as TEXT or as HTML.
	For those clients which have HTML, they pick up the hypertext
	version. The first seems easier. Can we use the same type for mail
	and news messages?

	Another idea. Suppose you run a server on the NNTP machine, so it
	has direct access to the news, and when news comes in you cross-link
	the references, so that you can follow links to replies to messages
	references BY a message as well as the messages it references.

	Maybe this could be done on the fly when the message is read.

	-Tim


pls pass on to the whole www crew....

ps.  you interested in starting a "comp.infosystems.web" group?
     should get a lot of attention.  my WAIS newgroup vote has
     150+ yes votes in the first two days !

	Sure, if you think it'll fly. I guess we have to gateway the mail
	for a while. Maybe comp.infosystems.www --- there is the "web and Cweb"
	toolset from Knuth (?) which we don't want to get confused with.