About NA2WWW

• Introduction
• How it works
• Status of the program
• To do
• MIME support
• Version history

Introduction

NA2WWW (News Archive to World Wide Web gateway) is a pilot project developed by Johan Svensson, Department of Business Administration at Lund University, on behalf of The National Agency for Education. The purpose of NA2WWW is to provide a neat interface to historical and up-to-date News Archives, created by NA (NewsArchiver).

NA2WWW is a CGI (Common Gateway Interface) program that will present a given set of archived USENET News groups, supplied by the Web Administrator of the site, where NA and NA2WWW are installed.

How it works

The current version (1.0) is a CGI program, written in C, which takes data input from either the CGI GET or the POST methods. The GET method has the following modes (in URL syntax):

NA2WWW?group:<group>
NA2WWW?group:<group>+mid:<message-id>
NA2WWW?mid:<message-id>

The <group> field is simply the name of an archived news group, for example swnet.general. The <message-id> field is the Message-ID of a certain message (article). The first mode lists the articles in a group, the second mode displays a given article in a group and the third mode tries to locate and display a given article in some group (the name is not supplied).

The POST method has the following valid variables:

search-text     = [text] | BLANK
search-case     = [on]
group           = [ | BLANK]

The variable search-text contains an empty value (BLANK) or a search-string. An empty value implies no searching and the search-string is sought for case insensitive (default).
If the variable search-case is set (to on), then NA2WWW will perform a case sensitive search.
If the variable group is missing or empty, then NA2WWW will search all news groups for a given search criterion, otherwise it will only search the given group.

Status of the program

Currently, there is only a prototype . The source code and a few binaries are available at ecsdg.lu.se/pub/unix/NA2WWW.

To do

Anything that seems to be worth the effort!

MIME support

If an article is written in MIME Quoted/Printable, NA2WWW will try to decode the article into plain iso-8859-1 HTML.

To avoid broken subjects, headers and articles, I have included a parsing mechanism that will scan for HTML-commands that we don't like to be interpreted by the local client. The "mess" is often produced in WWW-related groups, where examples on HTML-code are included, in "binary" groups where there are coded (by uuencode, BinHex, BASE64 etc.) binary data, but also in some "ordinary" articles.

If you really would like HTML-markup in an article, it should be in MIME-format:

   Mime-Version: 1.0
   Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
   Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

or:

   Mime-Version: 1.0
   Content-Type: text/x-html; charset=iso-8859-1
   Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

If an article use this scheme, NA2WWW will interpret all markup as expected. Be careful if you write HTML-articles, though!

Version history

Version 1.0, 1994-12-30

This is the first usable version(?)

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