virtual documents and <BASE>

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Date: Fri, 1 Oct 1993 09:27:10 +1200
From: Nathan Torkington <Nathan.Torkington@vuw.ac.nz>
Message-id: <199309302127.AA20077@kauri.vuw.ac.nz>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: virtual documents and <BASE>

I want virtual documents --- they are a Good Thing.  But I also want
them to be placed at arbitrary locations around my server, so that I
can place executable shell-scripts in the hierarchy and preserve the
directory-type URL.  I also want the shell-scripts to return pages
that are in other parts of the hierarchy. Eg

	http://host/foo/bar.html?greblit
actually returns the page
	http://host/baz/cat.html

The trouble is that the clients will think of the cat.html page as
having the URL http://host/foo/bar.html?greblit and so when I follow
the link <A HREF="dog.html"> (which is inside the cat.html file) I
will get the ``page''
	http://host/foo/dog.html
which I don't want.

All this can be fixed by having the shell script return <BASE
HREF="http://host/baz/cat.html"> at the top of the HTML file it finds.
Could client writers puhleeze implement the BASE tag?  It would be
bloody handy for searches (which return pointers into arbitrary places
of webspace).

Many thanks,

Nat
(on the campaign trail :)