Re: laptop MIME.

>  There is a separate group that works on NNTP and news-transport
>  and article definition issues.

There's no one group per se that decides what's OK and what's not OK
within netnews; the community is just too loosely structured for that.
What does happen is that people post stuff in a marked up, formatted
style, and other people write code that takes advantage of the markup,
and yet more people write down what the first batch did and post it 
monthly as a sort of a standards document.  I believe that the IETF
used to work something like that (try it, write down what you did,
try it again until you reach consensus).                                 
What you see a lot of on the net is NewsGrazer (aka
NeXTGrazer) postings, which is a way that NeXT users have of shoveling
around multimedia documents.  I think that Louie mentioned that getting
MIME up to speed and out the door is important to getting the 
existing installed based of multimedia netnews working with an
interoperable standard.  (NewsGrazer postings are uuencoded tar
files, or some such thing, quite unreadable by the human eye;
MIME is at least not too horrible to stare at.                           
Sad to say it, if you really want MIME to take off, you need to
convince the people posting to alt.binaries.pictures.* to use it.
The state of the art there is uuencoded JPEG images, often posted
in a series (parts 1-5) to get around maximum news article limits.
A successful standard will need to be able to accomodate those
limitations.                                                             
<sig>
 Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, MSEN Inc. emv(_at_)msen(_dot_)com
      MSEN Inc., 628 Brooks, Ann Arbor MI  48103 +1 313 741 1120
     "Things are glued together with spit and bailing wire now."
</sig>