Hypertext address for net News

The format of a hypertext reference to information in the internet/usenet news system can take any of the following forms:
news: newsgroup
This refers to a list of articles currently available in the given newsgroup. The newsgroup is a series of alphanumeric characters and dots.
news:*
This refers to a list of valid newsgroups.
news: message_id
This refers to a given article explicitly. The message_id is optionally surrounded by angle brackets, and must contain an @ sign.
Possible extensions to this are more generous wildcarding for the list of newsgroups. It takes too long to load the whole list, and it would be more useful to be able to browse through a set of newsgroups.

There is no way of referring to "unread" articles. Keeping track of this is the job of the browser.

Examples

news:<12345678@cernvax.cern.ch> news:12345678@cernvax.cern.ch These addresses both refer to the same (imaginary!) article by its unique message-id. (Note the hostname in the message-id is just part of the message id generated by the sender of the message - it is not a news server address). news:comp.sys.next.announce This refers to a list of articles in the newsgroup comp.sys.next.announce. The list is, of course, a list of references to article by message-id.