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000563_TONYJ@scs.slac.stanford.edu _Thu Jan 14 07:29:11 1993.msg
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id AA21379; Thu, 14 Jan 1993 07:44:22 +0100
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1993 22:44 PDT
From: "Tony Johnson (415) 926 2278" <TONYJ@scs.slac.stanford.edu>
Subject: Re: suggested libWWW architecture
To: connolly@pixel.convex.com
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
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From Dan:
>/* I think the WWW file: should be split into ftp: and local-file:.
> It's cleaner to implement; there are precedents in the MidasWWW local:
> scheme and the MIME ftp and local-file access-types. */
I agree. Here are some comments along the same lines I sent Tim a while back.
From Tim:
>Re "local:"
>
>The actual implementation of "file": in WWW checks the hostname to see
>whether it is the local host, and if so uses direct file access.
>(It also checks /Net/<hostname>/<path> in case of NFS mounting)
>That is why it was called "file:" rather than "ftp:". This means that you >can
>edit files under /pub which other people get with ftp. For example.
>The IETF WG wanted "ftp:" to be available, so I have made that a synonym >for
>"file:".
My immediate reason for implementing local was that MidasWWW implements "file:"
through the gateway, and so I needed some other temporary way to access local
files. When MidasWWW supports "file:" directly I may get rid of local (or make
it a synonym for file maybe). However I do have some other problems with the
file implementation, mainly the confusion between files access by ftp and files
accessed locally. Problems are:
a) How to tell whether a specified node is the "local" node? The /NET test is
not portable, it doesn't work on our Unix system here (we use /nfs here). It
works even less well on VAX clusters.
b) Even if I could tell that the file is on the local node, things still would
not work since /pub is NOT the root of the anonymous FTP directory. I.e.
file://localhost/test.html is NOT the same as local:/pub/test.html. Again this
applies even more to non-unix systems.
Both of these problems tempt me to keep local:, or some equivalent. Comments?
Tony