some of the stuff on ftp.cs.toronto.edu:/pub/emv/ is in WWW format

Edward Vielmetti <emv@ox.com>
Message-id: <m0kgVyd-000Bt4C@cato.aa.ox.com>
To: www-interest@nxoc01.cern.ch
Cc: archive-index@cs.toronto.edu, emv@msen.com
Subject: some of the stuff on ftp.cs.toronto.edu:/pub/emv/ is in WWW format
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 91 02:22:35 -0500
From: Edward Vielmetti <emv@ox.com>
X-Mts: smtp

I'm slowly but surely converting the files on ftp.cs.toronto.edu:/pub/emv
to be in the WWW format.  Right now the stuff in news-archives.README is
referred to that way, and some of the rest of the things in news-archives too.

I'm going out on a limb a tiny bit and writing references to things that
none of the clients know how to deal with yet, in the expectation that
useful data will inspire code.  In particular, I have some references
that look like

<a name=1 href=aftp://anonymous@ftp.cs.toronto.edu:/pub/emv/news-archives.README>
</a>

This aftp: tag is new.  I'm not completely happy with the use of the
file: tag to refer to remote files, since it can lead to situations
where references are ambiguous depending on whether you're dealing with
a file on the local system or that same file accessed via anonymous FTP
on the local system.  Adding an aftp: tag should help that.  The format
//user@host:/filename/ is quite similar to that used by ange-ftp, so
these references are immediately quite usable by existing code.
There's also the hope that if the aftp: thing gets to be popular it'll
be easier to pick out references to files from usenet postings, distinguishing
them from references to ftp (the protocol or the program).

It's useful (even necessary) to include the anonymous@ bit; there are some
sites (lib.stat.cmu.edu and research.att.com) with two parallel
"anonymous FTP" trees that have different user names to get to them;
a reference to
        <a href=aftp://netlib@research.att.com:/> </a>
is quite different than
        <a href=aftp://anonymous@research.att.com:/> </a>

comments etc welcomed.

at some point this archive is going to migrate back to ftp.msen.com,
but I'm waiting there on getting equipment a little more suitable to
the task.  

Tim, feel free to glue these into the web as best you see fit; I have
to go back and stick in all of the WAIS newsgroup mappings that
I collected before.
I'm also using
        <a href=wais://wais.domain.org:210/database?>
in anticipation of that tag being supported, it should be a matter of
a simple sed or perl script to convert those tags to their current
preferred format.

--Ed