HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
6.2.8. The news URL
Although rarely used anymore, the news URL accesses either a single
message or an entire newsgroup within the Usenet news system. It has
two forms:
news:
newsgroup
news:
message_id
An unfortunate limitation in news URLs is that they don't allow you
to specify a news server. Rather, users specify news servers in their
browser preferences. At one time, not long ago, Internet newsgroups
were nearly universally distributed; all news servers carried all the same
newsgroups and their respective articles, so one news server was as
good as any. Today, the sheer bulk of disk space needed to store the
daily volume of newsgroup activity is often prohibitive for any single
news server, and there's also local censorship of newsgroups. Hence,
you cannot expect that all newsgroups, and certainly not all articles for
a particular newsgroup, will be available on the user's news server.
Many users' browsers may not be correctly configured to read news. We
recommend that you avoid placing news URLs in your documents except
in rare cases.
6.2.8.1. Accessing entire newsgroups
Several thousand newsgroups are devoted to nearly every conceivable
topic under the sun, and beyond. Each group has a unique name, com-
posed of hierarchical elements separated by periods. For example, the
World Wide Web announcements newsgroup is:
comp.infosys.www.announce
To access this group, use the URL:
