Re: LYNX-DEV news: handling

[David Woolley]

>     news://news.host.com/address@hidden
> Should that really have another host name at the end? (I don't know what
> the hrefs looked like when it was working, unfortunately.)

According to the original definition of news:, it is the hostname at the
beginning that shouldn't be there; the one at the end is there to provide
a unique context for the rest of the message ID.

However, I believe the world has recently bowed to the Netscapism of
treating news: and nntp: the same, and nntp: is being phased out in
favour of a news: with combined semantics.  It is possible they have
a development version with this change in broken form.  (NB, as this
is presumably the internally generated news: URL, it doesn't have
to obey the world rules, only its own ones.)

The other thing that can cause this is that people using C-News can
compile their nntp server to use an incompatible message-ID database
type (this was a problem with earlier Slackware Linux distributions).

Note to the Lynx implementors: on nearly every server, retrieve by message-ID
is more expensive than retrieve by article number.  Having recently verified
a posting to the microsoft hierarchy by telnetting to msnews, I suspect that
the Microsoft implemenation may linear search the history file (message-ID
database).
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