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From: dce@smsc.sony.com (David Elliott)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Splitting news access from its presentation
Message-ID: <1990Mar15.170433.3910@smsc.sony.com>
Date: 15 Mar 90 17:04:33 GMT
References: <1990Mar14.233441.28554@light.uucp>
Reply-To: dce@Sony.COM (David Elliott)
Organization: Sony Microsystems Corp.
Lines: 34

This is similar to something I discussed briefly with Harry er.. Henry
Spencer last year.

One thing I also considered was a generalized "preferences"
mechanism a la X resources.  The user would have a database
of preferences that would be used as needed by the various
libraries and interface programs.

This would allow someone who uses many newsreaders to have one
single set of preferences.  In my case, I use rn at home, but
I would prefer to use a more graphical interface (though I don't
like xrn at this time) at work.

Thus, it should be possible to give both general and specific
preferences.  For example:

	FollowThreads:		true
	rn.FollowThreads:	subject

That is, for any newsreader but rn, the FollowThreads attribute
is "true", implying some general thread following mechanism. For
rn, the thread following should use the attribute "subject", which
would imply some special case of threads.

By providing this mechanism, programmers should be more sensitive
to user preferences (though this is just starting to gain widespread
acceptance in X, due to most people not taking the time to implement
it in many programs).

-- 
David Elliott
dce@smsc.sony.com | ...!{uunet,mips}!sonyusa!dce
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