Re: Dial-up Users

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Errors-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Errors-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Message-id: <9310271538.AA01722@austin.BSDI.COM>
To: dale@ora.com (Dale Dougherty)
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: Dial-up Users 
In-Reply-To: Dale Dougherty's message of Wed, 27 Oct 93 00:12:41 PDT.
Errors-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Reply-To: sanders@bsdi.com
Organization: Berkeley Software Design, Inc.
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1993 10:38:41 -0500
From: Tony Sanders <sanders@bsdi.com>

> on systems that are not directly connected to the network.  Right
> now, a SLIP/PPP connection is required to use a graphical browser; these
> connections are more expensive to obtain and more difficult to install.
> 
> What can we do to enable communication over a serial line?  

Doing this right would basically require reinventing SLIP and TCP/IP (you
need a reliable connection from end to end, ala tcp).  Once you have the
encapsulation protocol then all you need is to hack the CERN server to do
the translation and run it on both ends of the connection, then set
WWW_http_GATEWAY (and WWW_wais_GATEWAY, etc) to point to the local "gateway".

You don't want to hack this into the browser because then you are limiting
yourself to browsers that you have hacked.  By using a gateway every
browser that suppports WWW_http_GATEWAY (e.g., all libwww based browsers)
will work out of the box.  You can also add features like smart caching
to the local gateway (there is an effort underway to add caching to Plexus,
the prototypes are farily simple so it's not too hard to do).

--sanders