Re: linux news project impressions

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

In message <199808241333.JAA15327@typhoon.icd.teradyne.com>, lohner@typhoon.icd.teradyne.com writes:
>  This solution may be overly complex, but I think this system has a large 
>potential for growth so this might not be as over engineered as it seems.  
>Plus, NNTP is a well defined and common transfer protocol, which means that 
>less effort may be required that starting something from scratch.

It's true. At some point, we might want some real live nntp servers
dealing with the 'LNN'. I think we can get away with ignoring that for
the short-term, though, as I mentioned earlier.

>>I'll grant you that this is more work than what you propose. It's a very
>>interesting point, though, that *users* aren't going to be able to tell
>>the difference if we're using xml or whatever as a backend, so it might be
>>a good plan to get this set up and advertised now, and then we can fill
>>in some new fields and a backend later on.
>>
>  Users won't be able to tell, but once it picks up and you end up patching 
>whatever system you decide to use in the meantime, you'll be able to tell :) 
> And on top of that you need to do the conversion at some point anyway.  If 
>you want to get it off the ground, then do it with a limited set of XML tags 
>and don't implement all of the features, but have the basic skeleton in 
>place when you start, otherwise you'll be doing double the work.

Anybody want to give a shot at a pleasing layout for the news submission
page? I'll take care of doing the cgi-perl backend that turns it into
html-formatted text, and then I'll get Chris to tell me what's missing
between that and xml so we can get it "right".

Once that has happened, then we'll start examining what people need to do
to automate their "news feed" at their site, as well as providing some
generic xml->useful_text programs (hopefully Chris can help with identifying
some programs that would be handy there).

Anyway..anybody here good with graphics layout? It doesn't have to be
perfect -- it just has to be good enough for people to start commenting
on it.

(Wow, it's been a long time since I've done cgi.)
Thanks,
--Roger