Changing NNTP servers on the fly.

Edward Vielmetti (emv@msen.com)
Mon, 30 Mar 92 23:39:50 -0500


Message-Id: <m0lVadT-000HtvC@heifetz.msen.com>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Cc: cddev@sterling.com
Subject: Changing NNTP servers on the fly.
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 92 23:39:50 -0500
From: Edward Vielmetti <emv@msen.com>

I have a CD-ROM (Netnews/CD from Sterling Software) that has a big
pile of news in it -- and I'd like to support reasonable access to
it via WWW.  However; the current support for NNTP reading in WWW
assumes that there's a single NNTP server through which all
"news:" access will go, so it's not straightforward to support
a second system which might have an alternative access to a news spool.

I'd suggest extending the syntax to read as follows
	news:comp.sys.foo		comp.sys.foo on default system
	news://nntp.archive.msen.com/comp.sys.foo       nntp.archive.msen.com
	news://nntp.archive.msen.com:1990/comp.sys.foo  (on port 1990)
with similar extensions for referencing individual articles.

--Ed