No external viewers are needed. If posters convert files to HTML, readers won't have to launch external viewers because newsreaders can now render HTML attachments natively . If you post a Word document as an attachment, I can search for the text that you write only in the primary part of the message. Convert the attachment to HTML, and I can search that, too. That's just what I did when I received and posted John Davidson's white paper.
Attachments can be live applications.
She can package her survey as an HTML message and broadcast it to the staff. Two months after that, a fact-checker calls John to verify some information in the article. The Contacts newsgroup is the obvious place to record these interactions. If the editor and fact-checker add their notes as replies to the original message I posted, they'll create what we normally think of as a conversational thread. But in this context, the newsreader behaves more like a kind of shared outline proces sor.