home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Collection of Internet
/
Collection of Internet.iso
/
infosrvr
/
dev
/
www_talk.930
/
000957_mcrae@lib.ucsf.edu _Sat Apr 24 01:17:49 1993.msg
< prev
next >
Wrap
Internet Message Format
|
1994-01-24
|
2KB
Return-Path: <mcrae@lib.ucsf.edu>
Received: from dxmint.cern.ch by nxoc01.cern.ch (NeXT-1.0 (From Sendmail 5.52)/NeXT-2.0)
id AA00222; Sat, 24 Apr 93 01:17:49 MET DST
Received: from knowman.lib.ucsf.EDU by dxmint.cern.ch (5.65/DEC-Ultrix/4.3)
id AA28551; Sat, 24 Apr 1993 01:37:43 +0200
Received: from theodoric.lib.ucsf.EDU by knowman.lib.ucsf.EDU (4.1/GSC4.21)
id AA21197; Fri, 23 Apr 93 16:37:47 PDT
Message-Id: <9304232337.AA21197@knowman.lib.ucsf.EDU>
To: www-talk@lib.ucsf.edu
Subject: Re: how should remote path names be handled?
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 93 16:38:47 MDT
From: Christopher McRae <mcrae@lib.ucsf.edu>
Jay C. Weber writes:
> How about variable name substitution in URLs? E.g., you
> could use a HREF=file://$parentsite$parentdir/foo.html to make
> explicit how the broswer should construct relative pathnames.
>
> The advantage of this over the current HREF=file:foo.html
> scheme is it opens up many other kinds of context-sensitive
> URLs, like substituting the parentsite but naming a new
> directory path. Or, browsers (the WWW library I guess) could
> define new variables like $standardsite, which would depend
> on the user's continent (per the recent suggestion about
> distributing servers).
If you are going to add variable substitution to URL's, then perhaps
it would be best to define two types of variables: those which are
to be interpreted by the client, and those which the server should
expand.
Thus, a user could configure their browser session so as to
force a particular interpretation of any "variant" links
encountered. The $standardsite variable mentioned above is
one example of a variable which should be interpreted locally,
i.e. by the client.
Server-interpreted variables, on the other hand, could be used
by information administrators to ease the task of maintaining
document archives and to enhance reliability and efficiency. The
$parentsite and $parentdir variables mentioned in Jay's message
are examples of these types of variables. Another example would
be a $least_busy_server_of_group_GROUP variable, as in
http://$least_busy_of_group_GROUP/foo.html.
The server would replace this variable with the address of the least
busy server in the group of servers named GROUP.
So, how are the two types distinguished? Suppose that a server
variable is preceeded by a single '$'. and client variables would be
referenced by two $, o