Jargons of Info Tech industry

[Ulrich Hobelmann]

usenet at isbd.co.uk wrote:
> In comp.lang.perl.misc John Bokma <john at castleamber.com> wrote:
>>> the argument that usenet should never change seems a little
>>> heavy-handed and anachronistic.
>> No, simple since there *are* alternatives: web based message boards. Those 
>> alternatives *do* support HTML formatting (often the subset mentioned 
> 
> ... and generally these "web based message boards" (i.e. forums I
> assume you mean) have none of the useful tools that Usenet offers and
> are much, much slower.

That is because NNTP and its applications didn't evolve to feed the 
glitzy need lots of users have.

Sadly web forums (esp. the ugly, sloooow PHPBB, and the unspeakable 
Google groups) are increasingly replacing usenet, but there are 
exceptions (DragonflyBSD).

On the information side (in contrast to the discussion side) RSS is 
replacing Usenet, with some obvious disadvantages: go on vacation, 
return after a week, and -- yahoo! -- all your RSS feeds only turn of 
the, say, most recent 30 articles, while your newsgroups all show 
everything you missed.

There is no real reason why NNTP couldn't be used like RSS (i.e. contain 
a small description and a web link as message text), or why a newsgroup 
shouldn't we written in HTML and contain a (default, or user-provided) 
CSS sheet.  If things were that way, suddenly people *would* use Outlook 
and Thunderbird for news-reading, while today everything is just 
Browser+HTTP.

Oh, yes:</rant>

-- 
I believe in Karma.  That means I can do bad things to people
all day long and I assume they deserve it.
	Dogbert