ietf-nntp NEWNEWS deprecation.

Dave Fielder dave at wildbear.on.ca
Wed Dec 3 10:10:12 PST 1997


Sadly I beleive that the discussion lacks the vision necessary to
get the issue of NEWNEWS deprecation resolved. Lets put the vision back in.

Creating a standard for practices of today is only useful (outside of
historical
fact) if the standard is used in the future. Therefore, the real question of
NEWNEWS is not its application (or lack thereof) today, but its application
tommorrow based upon what we can do with it today.

NEWNEWS works very well in dumb client applications. With the advance of
desktop equipment the clients have become increasingly intelligent and
the need for NEWNEWS has decreased. I believe the trend has come to an end.

There is currently a trend in the technologies today towards what I like to
call "Internet in a watch". The "watch" is capable of interfacing to just
about every protocal invented. This is not the same as "mainframe
in a watch" (altough it is close), in that the watch is not capable of
playing chess better than the world champion and cannot plot the course
of the furture of the human race.

The above paragraph may be a bunch of blather, except that it points to
a return to the dumb client days and hence a increase in the demand for
NEWNEWS. If NEWNEWS did not exist today then today would be a good time to
add such a feature.

Remove NEWNEWS and you handi-cap any attempt to install news browsers on
watchs and microcontrollers which may interface to news in the future.

But more importantly you also hurt such items as electronic organizers,
robotic filters/seachers/news gathers, and dumb clients that do use NEWNEWS
and will continue to use NEWNEWS tomorrow.

As for implementation ... well ... if it were easy we wouldn't
get paid to do it :-)

An aside:

Although NNTP is based around a client/server model I beleive the description
is a little too loose. NNTP provides a client/server model for the
distribution of news. Except when slaving is used NNTP provides a
client/server
model for storage of news articles. NEWNEWS goes further and provides
client/server model for processing of news. Client/Server models for
processing
is what allow dumb terminals and microcontroller implementations to
thrive in advanced/intelligent environments.

My vote would be to stand by NEWNEWS.

Hope this helps.
Dave Fielder
dfielder at sentex.net
http://www.sentex.net/~dfielder
WildBear Consulting Inc.
dave at wildbear.on.ca
(519) 725-3858



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