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(gnus)Browsing the Web

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Browsing the Web
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   Web-based discussion forums are getting more and more popular.  On
many subjects, the web-based forums have become the most important
forums, eclipsing the importance of mailing lists and news groups.  The
reason is easy to understand--they are friendly to new users; you just
point and click, and there's the discussion.  With mailing lists, you
have to go through a cumbersome subscription procedure, and most people
don't even know what a news group is.

   The problem with this scenario is that web browsers are not very
good at being newsreaders.  They do not keep track of what articles
you've read; they do not allow you to score on subjects you're
interested in; they do not allow off-line browsing; they require you to
click around and drive you mad in the end.

   So--if web browsers suck at reading discussion forums, why not use
Gnus to do it instead?

   Gnus has been getting a bit of a collection of back ends for
providing interfaces to these sources.

Web Searches

Creating groups from articles that match a string.

Slashdot

Reading the Slashdot comments.

Ultimate

The Ultimate Bulletin Board systems.

Web Archive

Reading mailing list archived on web.

Customizing w3

Doing stuff to Emacs/w3 from Gnus.

   All the web sources require Emacs/w3 and the url library to work.

   The main caveat with all these web sources is that they probably
won't work for a very long time.  Gleaning information from the HTML
data is guesswork at best, and when the layout is altered, the Gnus
back end will fail.  If you have reasonably new versions of these back
ends, though, you should be ok.

   One thing all these Web methods have in common is that the Web
sources are often down, unavailable or just plain too slow to be fun.
In those cases, it makes a lot of sense to let the Gnus Agent (Note:
Gnus Unplugged) handle downloading articles, and then you can read
them at leisure from your local disk.  No more World Wide Wait for you.