Re: LYNX-DEV news: handling

[Bela Lubkin]

Klaus Weide wrote:

> On Thu, 16 Oct 1997, David Woolley wrote:
> 
> > 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.)
> 
> Comment on the parenthesis:
> 
> It is however a nice benefit if that "internally generated" URL happens
> to also be globally valid.  After all there is nothing that prevents those
> private URLs from escaping the context of a Lynx page.  They can be
> bookmarked, saved to a file, sent to a different machine as mail ( \ p )
> and so on.  IMO that is more important than the benefit of saving a NNTP
> server a bit of work, as in your following suggestion:
> 
> > 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).

The benefit David mentions is not only to the news server, but also to
the Lynx user, who does not have to wait as long for articles to come
up.  I've used enough slow news servers to know that Message-ID lookups
can be perceivably much slower than by group and number.  Like, in one
case, up to 2 minutes vs. 2 seconds.  Yes, the server was overloaded to
the point of being broken, but as a user, I had no control over that,
and would not have appreciated being further punished by my news reading
tool.

>Bela<

-- 
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