| Lauri Alanko 2004-06-03, 7:27 pm |
| In article <4pkhdu4l6st.fsf@thar.lbl.gov>,
<taltman@noshpam.lbl.government> wrote:
>
> And the Google groups URLs would break if the Google company should
> close. ;-)
Note that the url still contains the Message-ID, so that the identity
of the denoted article is still obvious even if the document could not
be fetched from the given url.
The proper way to identify Usenet messages is of course to use the
"news" scheme: <URL:news:b2c706$d6q$1@la.iki.fi>. People just use
google because most software tends to support http URLs better. (And
often the referred articles are so old that they are probably lost
from ordinary news servers, and a smart client program would have to
know to retrieve it from google.)
URLs are really ridden with all kinds of persistency and identity
problems. I wish URNs became usable with ordinary documents...
Lauri Alanko
la@iki.fi
|