Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!killer!texbell!nuchat!sugar!ficc!peter
From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Finding a needle in a haystack (was: future public nets)
Message-ID: <2589@ficc.uu.net>
Date: 30 Dec 88 16:00:42 GMT
References: <75@sopwith.UUCP> <377@intek01.UUCP> <5859@saturn.ucsc.edu>
Organization: Xenix Support
Lines: 24

In article <5859@saturn.ucsc.edu>, koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu.ucsc.edu (Steven Grimm) writes:
> Why not scrap all the news software and start anew?  It should be possible
> to retain all of the old functionality, but in a new context.  For instance,
> quoting part of an article and commenting on it is VERY hypertext-ish --
> but why retransmit most of the original article every time it's quoted?

Because people are lazy. They don't want to summarize, summarize, summarize.
For example, many people would have included the first 10 lines of your
article, including all the quotes. They're no longer necessary and are
available through the 'p' key in vnews.

Most of the time. You're really asking "why quote at all?", are you not? Well
that's easy. Articles get lost. Articles arrive before their parents. And so
on... and there's really no way to fix this without wrecking usenet.

> But hypertext is obviously going to replace what we have now at some point...

I don't see that this follows. Hypertext doesn't seem compatible with such a
radically distributed environment as we have here.
-- 
Peter da Silva, Xenix Support, Ferranti International Controls Corporation.
Work: uunet.uu.net!ficc!peter, peter@ficc.uu.net, +1 713 274 5180.   `-_-'
Home: bigtex!texbell!sugar!peter, peter@sugar.uu.net.                 'U`
Opinions may not represent the policies of FICC or the Xenix Support group.