I grant that what you say is true. But it's only part of the picture. By
modern standards, for example, the FTP interface is barbarous.
> (FYI, I'm the author of Helldiver which
> was mentioned earlier in the thread).
Kudos are emitted in your direction. Seriously. I haven't used Helldiver, but
I've heard good things about it. It has a rep as a clever and well-crafted
piece of software.
> > No, it's going to happen in the other direction; Web browsers will swallow
> > newsreaders, just as they're swallowing FTP and Gopher access now.
>
> Maybe. Although there are some things that maybe should be done in a
> separate tool by a more highly focused design and development team. The
> problem with monolithic tools is that one tends to focus on improving the
> gestalt rather than improving parts of it. FTP and Gopher were similar
> enough to HTTP that the integration was easy.
This is a good point. I think we'll probably see several different approaches,
including but not limited to:
1) Web browsers that speak NNTP.
2) Newsreaders that can detect HTML anchors and shell out to a Web browser.
3) Newsreaders that can detect HTML anchors and have integral browsing support
via the WWW library.
4) "Servient" processes that read your .newsrc, speak NNTP and present Web
documents that look like (and are!) newsgroup index lists.
> Maybe I should shut up because this is getting way off the reason for this
> mailing list, and is heading into religious territory ...
Actually I think this is still on point, though arguments about which are
the "best" newsreaders would not be.
-- Eric S. Raymond <esr@locke.ccil.org> WWW: //www.thyrsus.com/~esr/home.html
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