Templeton's Known Limitations

Due to the vast options available on most web servers, Templeton is not capable of retrieving some types of documents. These known limitations effect virtually all types of web robots and are described below. Many of these limitations are expected to be corrected in later releases, although currently no dates have been announced.

• Image Maps There are currently four ways to resolve imagemap URL addresses:
  1. Client-Side processing requires the URL to be identified by the client application. Templeton supports this method.
  2. CERN/NCSA server-side mappings use the URL path to describe the mapping program (generally imagemap) and the server's path to the map file. Templeton attempts to resolve the map file's path from the applications path, but may fail if the server does not return error 404 (not found) for invalid document paths.
  3. Imagemaps may refer to executables. Since Templeton cannot decompile executables, these imagemaps cannot be retrieved.
  4. Some servers support map directories where all files in the directory are processed as map resolution files. These servers do not permit the retrieval of the map document. Consequently, map directory references are not supported by Templeton.
• Templeton attempts to identify file types using HEAD requests. Some servers (especially database systems) return errors for HEAD requests but complete documents for GET commands. Templeton may incorrectly determine a file as unretrievable if the HEAD request fails.
• Some servers do not return error 404 (or 4xx) for invalid documents. A few servers have been seen returning HTML documents containing containing a text error message and return code 200 (OK). Templeton will incorrectly process these documents. (In the case of imagemaps, these documents will not be processed.)
• Templeton performs a single-pass processing all documents. If a link is thought to exist (and placed in the processing queue) but later is unretrievable, all previously retrieved documents will contain links to a nonexisting file.
• Templeton does not support passwords. This will be changed in future releases.
• Templeton cannot determine if a mounted drive supports long file names. It is assumed that the drive does support long file names, but this may be a bad assumption. For example, a DOS machine can export a partition to a Linux system running Templeton. The user must set the FATFlag in the configuration file to overcome this problem. The DOS version of Templeton (when released) does not support long file names.
• Files generated with Templeton have the current creation date rather than the date provided from the web server. This is expected to be a configuration option in later releases.
• Templeton does not support text entry fields, selections, or pushbuttons.
• Templeton does not support POST commands.
• Templeton does not retrieve Java source code. This feature may be available in later releases.
• Templeton may seem to hang when the nameserver is unable to resolve a hostname. This "hanging" is the nameserver request timing out. This interval is system dependent, but is generally no longer than two minutes. Currently, Templeton is single-threaded and is at the mercy of this limitation. This may be corrected in later releases.
• gethostname() under OS/2 does not resolve if the environment variable HOSTNAME is not set. This function also has problems when operated on a gateway using a private LAN and a PPP/SLIP interface. Currently, the user must set their username in the configuration file. This will be corrected in future releases.
• Command_html, Command_image, Command_map, and Command_default may generate undesirable results, including crashing Templeton, if the command contains multiple '%' characters or a '%' followed by a character other than a lower-case 's'. These commands require at most one '%s'.