Re: Where Usenet News can be better

At 10:31 +0100 97-05-09, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
> The original suggestion was to keep abstracts around much longer and in
> many more places than full articles. Looking at Usenet, I suggest that
> using the first 40 lines as a default abstract would be useless.

No, that was not the original suggestion. The original suggestion was that
those who wanted to see more than 40 lines, could retrieve them, using an
URL supplied with the message. I do not understand why this would be
useless. Probably many recipients of long messages do not want to read more
than 40 lines.

If your experience is that the first 40 lines are not a good abstracting
method, one could consider more intelligent methods, for example the first
40 lines not preceded by "> ". But my experience is that the first 40
lines work perfecly well for me in e-mail, Usenet News may be different.

Caching with backup of full documents at a remote site is already common
in WWW, why could it not also be used in Usenet News?

MIME already has a format for this:

Multipart/alternative

	First part Message/external with an URL to the place where you
	can retrieve the whole article

	Second part the abbreviated message with an addendum that it
	has been abbreviated

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Jacob Palme <jpalme <at> dsv.su.se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme