Those of us from netnews land are still here and listening. My take is:
1. Let's put it to bed already!
2. Netnews will likely adopt MIME, whole cloth, but never raw (i.e.
always encoded for 7bit transport). At least, this is what I want,
because it will vastly simplify introduction. I'm sure that someone
will disagree with me. Let's argue someplace else about it.
3. If I never have to write an encoder for the mail->netnews gateway
code, I will be happy.
4. Digests are a foul, evil thing. They should be stamped out. They
were originally intended as an efficiency item - mail batching to keep
MIT-MC from overloading itself on processing too many mailing lists.
Netnews handles this problem in the depths of the transport,
completely invisibly to the user. Digests are, therefore, a sender
limited presentation format. I don't believe that the sender should be
able to do that - I think it should be up to the user (with his trusty
netnews interface) to determine presentation style & format. This does
not mean that I am against moderated groups - far from it! I would not
have saved them from extinction some years ago if I did not believe in
the mechanism.
5. Netnews will have the same problem with message composers as mail.
We'll need 'em too. Anyone want to bet on which platform will have the
first one explicitly for netnews?
speaking for myself,
Erik E. Fair apple!fair fair(_at_)apple(_dot_)com
Postmaster, Engineering Computer Operations
Apple Computer, Inc.
(for identification purposes only)