I was thinking of a "local" gateway at each site (or even on the local workstation).
This makes sense for our site because all our off-site FTP traffic has to go through
a security gateway anyway.
Actually I believe the www library already has an optional provision for this anyway.
By setting an environment variable like WWW_file_GATEWAY, all "file:" requests
can be redirected to a local server. Does this still work?
In any case, I still hold that fancy features like threaded news should be
implemented in a server, not in the WWW clients.
-- Steve