Re: Is HTTP necessary??

brian@eitech.com (Brian Smithson)

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Date: Mon, 17 May 93 17:14:52 PDT
From: brian@eitech.com (Brian Smithson)
Message-id: <9305180014.AA05566@eitech.com>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: Is HTTP necessary??
Cc: p.lister@cranfield.ac.uk

Oops. I didn't finish the thought before mistakenly delivering the message! :-(
Let me try that again...

"Peter Lister, Cranfield Computer Centre" writes:

> HTML is great, but is HTTP worth it? I'm want practical details, so
> don't send me philosophical waffle or flame me for being a traitor
> to WWW, cos I'm not. 

Here's a practical detail, one which pushed me over the edge to setting
up an http server for internal uses.  I wanted to be able to refer to
documents (via hyperlinks) which were rooted somewhere, rather than having
to do a lot of messy stuff like "href=../../../foo/bar.html".  I found it much
easier to use "href=http://host.domain/foo/bar.html".  It can also be 
a lot easier to maintain.

One could use ftp instead of http, but http is a bit more permissive about
following symbolic links (e.g. outside of ~ftp, for example).

-Brian