Re: Revisting NNTP?

["Bill Kearney" <wkearney99@hotmail.com>]

> Been thinking about this and also with respect to the XML-RPC over 
smtp
> and SOAP over smtp efforts. I think all these approaches really 
ought to
> use Mime multipart and attach raw XML to the message as an 
attachment.
> This is a little more work to code but shouldn't be hard both to 
create
> and to parse.
> 
> Adding a human readable part as well would be optional. Any attempt 
to
> define that the Subject line, some header or some part of the body
> contains a particular piece of the puzzle is always going to run 
into
> interop and standardization issues.  
> 
> In the context of RSS over nntp, this would mean that the attachment
> should be a completely valid RSS file including channel information.
> It's then up to the sender how often they create one and how many 
items
> it contains. If they want to generate a message for every new item, 
it
> would just have one item entry. If they want to do an end of day 
message
> it would have any new items added that day.  

Hmmm, my point of using NNTP was to provide two things.  One is the 
ability to use better viewing engines such as found in many NNTP 
compatible readers.  The other is to take advantage of several search 
and filtering engines that can interact with an NNTP server.  

Using a one-per-day or bulk message of many items defeats my purpose 
of being able to find by individual items.  Yes, you could still find 
them but they'd be in the middle of unrelated data.    Find a days 
worth of items (or any time interval) is trivial in most NNTP client 
applications.

But, keeping XML information, in it's raw form, is a requirement.  
None of the existing NNTP clients that I've seen understand using XML 
attachments.  That's no reason to delete it.  The goal I'm really 
after is two-fold.  One is better human interface to the data.  The 
other is routing.  There'd be little point of making the data useful 
for just readability. 

Also consider the wealth of tools for NNTP to mail and other 
environments.

-Bill Kearney