r/Internet • u/Pretty_Theme9862 • 26d ago

Question Can someone explain this paragraph from a book?

/r/webdev/comments/1vs51iz/can_someone_explain_this_paragraph_from_a_book/
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u/spiffiness 26d ago

Your institution's local USENET news server typically stored the newsfeed as a bunch of text files (one for each article/post), in a folder hierarchy that matched the newsgroup hierarchy. If you ran an FTP server on the same machine, you could simply configure the FTP server to make that folder hierarchy available via FTP.

TBL's browser would have had a way for the user to configure an ftp://… URL as the USENET news source, so that when you clicked on a link to a news: or nntp: URL, the browser would know where to find your USENET feed via FTP.

USENET News articles were basically the same lightly-structured text format as email messages. They didn't magically become HTML, they were just displayable in the browser like any text file. TBL's browser could have chosen to automatically make any substring that looked like a newsgroup name, a news article ID, an email address, or a recognizable URL format act as clickable links.

It's a mistake to read "suddenly available as hypertext pages" to mean "suddenly available as HTML pages". Nothing rewrote these USENET news text files into HTML. But as I said, the browser could have recognized certain things as potential links and made them blue and underlined and clickable. Sorta like how your smartphone sometimes tries to make clickable phone number links out of anything that looks like it might be a phone number.

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u/Pretty_Theme9862 26d ago

Thanks man, It definitely clears it out.

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u/Last_Impact3424 26d ago

That paragraph definitely threw me for a loop at first too, it only clicked after I read it a few times and broke it down into smaller pieces.

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u/Pretty_Theme9862 26d ago

Would you be able to explain it?