Rich Content vs. News Client

I object to the statement "Discussion data no longer needs to propagate around the world by way of replication.[...] News clients can hop instantly from server to server, just as Web clients can." in "HTML + NNTP = Groupware" (September Web Project).

I'm a regular newsgroup user at Supelec and enjoy LAN speed when reading the news (almost instantaneous, even when there are pictures). Sometimes I read the news from Georgia Tech Lorraine, a French Georgia Tech campus that doesn't have a news server. We default to the fastest one available -- Supelec. This cuts down our download bandwidth from 300 KBps to about 5 KBps and makes it a nightmare to read any "enhanced message" such as the HTML files with p ictures, etc., you seem to be advo cating. One of the advantages of the Usenet compared to the Web is its speed, which is due to both simple ASCII content and local replication. Your suggestion of a Usenet without data replication and with rich content would kill this advantage.

Benoit Cerrina
Benoit.Cerrina@supelec.fr

Replication certainly has its uses. However, I would draw a sharp distinction between "rich content" and "HTML files with pictures." A lot of the enrichment that comes from the use of HTML in an NNTP context is simply the enrichment of text with styles, colors, tables, and hyperlinks. None of this need involve bulky pictures; it's just ASCII text that happens to include HTML markup. Used this way, I find NNTP -- even at typical over-the-Internet Web-page-transfer speed -- to be an enormous enhancement over plain ASCII. --Jon Udell