Let’s look at how this works today at Microsoft’s site. Suppose you’re interested in Extensible Markup Language (XML), and you land on Microsoft’s XML home page (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2-1. Microsoft’s XML home page

Note how the third paragraph in the right hand frame includes a link labeled microsoft.public.xml. Although it looks like a normal http:// link that leads to a web page, it isn’t. Instead it’s a news:// link that leads to an NNTP newsgroup hosted on Microsoft’s news server, msnews.microsoft.com. When you click the link, your newsreader starts up.^[3] If you’ve never visited this news server before, it’s automatically added to the list of servers tracked by your newsreader, and you’re automatically subscribed to the newsgroup whose name was encoded in the link’s address. As we’ll see again in Chapter 13, this shortcut is a terrific way to catapult visitors into the midst of a discussion. The alternative procedure, which involves manually attaching to the news server, viewing its list of available groups, and subscribing to one or more groups, is cumbersome and hard to explain to visitors not already familiar with NNTP conferencing.

What is a newsreader? It’s a client application that connects to news servers, retrieves lists of newsgroups, reads and posts articles (messages), and displays messages in several ways. Like the mail and web components of the standard Internet client, the newsreader talks to its own kind of server using its own protocol. But in the Netscape and Microsoft implementations, the newsreader appears to the user as a facet of the email client. See Figure 2.2, which shows my Netscape messaging environment.

Figure 2-2. Microsoft’s XML newsgroup

Along with my email inbox, and its subfolders, we can see two different NNTP servers—one at Microsoft, one at Netscape. Because I clicked on a web link whose address was news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.xml, that newsgroup is the current selection. Messages are listed in the top right hand pane, and shown in the bottom right hand pane. If I click on an email folder, these viewing panes will instead display email messages. Although mail and news use different protocols and talk to different kinds of servers, they share a common user interface and behave similarly. (See the following tip.)

What’s going on in this XML newsgroup? In the fragment we can see, someone’s asking how to install Microsoft’s XML parser as a standalone component not tied to Internet Explorer. If you were to read further, you’d see an interesting dialogue taking place involving third-party developers and the Microsoft employee designated to monitor this newsgroup. The developers were disappointed to hear from a Microsoft representative that, at the release of Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 (MSIE 5), the XML parser would not be redistributable or separately installable, though it would be made so “at a later date.” When might that date arrive? That will partly depend on the number and intensity of requests directed to this newsgroup. All sorts of useful things are happening here. A community of XML-oriented developers, given a place to gather, compare notes, and learn from one another, builds a pool of knowledge that it can tap to its own benefit. Microsoft gains a focus group that enables it to monitor the pulse of that community, and a channel it can use to talk directly to the community.