lear@turbo.bio.net (Eliot) (06/26/91)
Here is one way to put together the document. The protocol should have at least four types of commands: [1] Identification/Authentication. [2] Restrictions/Negotiations. [3] Article/header/body search/access mechanisms. [4] Posting mechanisms. 1 is the obvious. 2 would allow the news server to tell the reader just what is allowed; sort of like the ACCESS command that Brian described in his draft. I envision it being slightly more complicated, and quite probably tied to who you are. For example, some sites might allow full scale searching, while others might support only limited searching (say from within a newsgroup). Quite possibly different indices will be available on different machines. For example, a source archive might not index From, but might index Subject. On the other hand, my local machine might index both. The goal is to make sure that adminstrators are able to control their resources. 3 and 4 are the obvious, as well. I want several things out of the reader document - it should handle binary information. I expect the mail people to push through a binary data transmission standard, and I want news to keep pace with mail. I would like to regain the ability to figure out just who's reading what. In theory we can do this with Stan's and Brian's hacks now. What more? Comments? Eliot Lear [lear@turbo.bio.net]