Managing Google Groups headaches

[rusi]

On Thursday, December 5, 2013 6:28:54 AM UTC+5:30, Roy Smith wrote:
>  Rich Kulawiec wrote:

> > Yes, I'm
> > aware of web forums: I've used hundreds of them.  They suck.  They ALL
> > suck, they just all suck differently.  I could spend the next several
> > thousand lines explaining why, but instead I'll just abbreviate: they
> > don't handle threading, they don't let me use my editor of choice,
> > they don't let me build my own archive that I can search MY way including
> > when I'm offline, they are brittle and highly vulnerable to abuse
> > and security breaches, they encourage worst practices in writing
> > style (including top-posting and full-quoting), they translate poorly
> > to other formats, they are difficult to archive, they're even more
> > difficult to migrate (whereas Unix mbox format files from 30 years ago
> > are still perfectly usable today), they aren't standardized, they
> > aren't easily scalable, they're overly complex, they don't support
> > proper quoting, they don't support proper attribution, they can't
> > be easily forwarded, they...oh, it just goes on.  

> The real problem with web forums is they conflate transport and 
> presentation into a single opaque blob, and are pretty much universally 
> designed to be a closed system.  Mail and usenet were both engineered to 
> make a sharp division between transport and presentation, which meant it 
> was possible to evolve each at their own pace.

> Mostly that meant people could go off and develop new client 
> applications which interoperated with the existing system.  But, it also 
> meant that transport layers could be switched out (as when NNTP 
> gradually, but inexorably, replaced UUCP as the primary usenet transport 
> layer).

There is a deep assumption hovering round-about the above -- what I
will call the 'Unix assumption(s)'.  But before that, just a check on
terminology. By 'presentation' you mean what people normally call
'mail-clients': thunderbird, mutt etc. And by 'transport' you mean
sendmail, exim, qmail etc etc -- what normally are called
'mail-servers.'  Right??

Assuming this is the intended meaning of the terminology (yeah its
clearer terminology than the usual and yeah Im also a 'Unix-guy'),
here's the 'Unix-assumption':

  - human communication…
(is not very different from)
  - machine communication…
(can be done by)
  - text…
(for which)
  - ASCII is fine…
(which is just)
  - bytes…
(inside/between byte-memory-organized)
  - von Neumann computers

To the extent that these assumptions are invalid, the 'opaque-blob'
may well be preferable.