On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
> [...] USENET fails to scale because it sends every byte every where in
> case anyone anywhere might want it.
I always thought that Usenet was a nice combination of push and pull that
scales remarkably well when it should. And the idea of using something
like NNTP (not propogated through Usenet) or IMAP really does strike me as
nice way to enable archives to be available.
> So what I decided to explore was to simply (hah!) dump everything into
> MySQL, use MySQL's fulltext search system as the basis of a search
> engine, and then start building interfaces to the data -- and just
> create an api and environment to allow people to build interfaces to the
> data. The data lives in the database. It's never changed. It's simply
> made ready ofr display. Want an iMap interface? Fine. Web sorted by
> list, date and author? Sure. Threaded? No problemo. Based on the octal
> represenation of the 12th byte of the 4th paragraph? Sure, why not?
I agree that it is useful to separate the concecpts of "storage form" from
"access form". So, when I support the idea of IMAP, I don't care if the
backend is mbox, tenex or a proper SQL query system. Same goes for NNTP.
The appeal of allowing access to archives by NNTP is not because I'm an
advocate on news spools.
What is nice about NNTP and IMAP (and others) is that they are naturally
appropriate for (2)822 style messages.
But I completely agree with you that it would be stupid to confuse
presentation format with archive format. Particularly where the
presentation transformation is not easily reversable.
-j
--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice
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