Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site ucbvax.ARPA Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!decwrl!ucbvax!fair From: fair@ucbvax.ARPA (Erik E. Fair) Newsgroups: net.news Subject: Re: Why digests are bad Message-ID: <10382@ucbvax.ARPA> Date: Sat, 14-Sep-85 09:22:06 EDT Article-I.D.: ucbvax.10382 Posted: Sat Sep 14 09:22:06 1985 Date-Received: Sun, 15-Sep-85 05:17:43 EDT References: <10220@ucbvax.ARPA> <764@vortex.UUCP> <1471@umcp-cs.UUCP> Organization: University of California at Berkeley Lines: 29 I get the distinct impression that everyone missed the point (everyone, that is, except Larry Wall and Charlie Mangoe). With the information contained in the header of a news article, your wonderful whizzy user-interface can construct a digest of all the articles posted on September 10th, 1985 if you want. It is wrong for the user interfaces to have undigestifying code in them, because they should not have to deal with two kinds of article structure. And because there is more useful information in the header of single netnews articles than there is in the header of a generic digest article (no message-id, or references, ...), there are more things you can do with single netnews articles. THAT is why digests are bad. 1) They force us to have crufty code to deal with them in the user-interfaces (which from a design point of view is wrong) 2) They break existing and potential functionality otherwise provided by a netnews article header, by not having the requisite information. Larry Wall is also correct in stating that sorting of netnews articles is the province of rnews, and therefore refusing to provide such capability in rn (among other things, that would slow it down). Erik E. Fair ucbvax!fair fair@ucbarpa.BERKELEY.EDU Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com