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A link like <a href="news:de.soc.netzkultur.misc">dsnm</a> is reported by the online version as... | What to do: This is a server-side problem. Check the URI. | HTTP Code returned: 500 | HTTP Message: Can't connect to nntp server ...this could be improved. Or is it a error 40 and I should use news:///group instead of news:group ? The news: scheme as interpreted by Netscape 3.x apparently uses the syntax... news:[//[server]/][group|escape(Message-ID)] ...where Message-ID is what it says without angle brackets.
AFAIK RFC 1738 is the authoritative specification for news: and nntp: URIs. The expired draft-gilman-news-url-02 (eg. <http://www.landfield.com/usefor/drafts/draft-gilman-news-url-02.txt>), suggests some updates to RFC 1738. The 500 error you see is because the online version of checklink at validator.w3.org doesn't have a default NNTP server set for use with news: URIs without an explicit hostname. I have added the following snippet to the checklink documentation: There are multiple alternatives for configuring the default NNTP server for use with news: URIs, see Net::NNTP(3) for more information. http://search.cpan.org/dist/libnet/Net/NNTP.pm#CONSTRUCTOR Unfortunately, even this doesn't help with news: URIs containing only the newsgroup name, because that functionality isn't supported in Net::NNTP which is the backend (through LWP::Protocol::nntp) for news: URIs in checklink. It does make the error message a bit better though: "501 GET newsgroup not implemented yet". Resolving with LATER for now.