Re: X Mosaic, FTP and PASV

Dave_Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
From: Dave_Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
Message-id: <9312031113.AA26961@manuel.hpl.hp.com>
Subject: Re:  X Mosaic, FTP and PASV
To: ellson@hotsand.att.com
Date: Fri, 3 Dec 93 11:13:10 GMT
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Mailer: Elm [revision: 66.36.1.1]
> Your PASV code is great!  It gets rid of all of the AT&T firewall patches
> from HTFTP.c and it considerably simplifies even the non-firewall
> version of the code.

Thanks!

>> At the same I changed it over to display a conventional
>> directory listing so that users can see the file permissions and
>> size. This is done in a robust way and should be at least as robust
>> as the previous code. In place of the icons it now shows a trailing
>> character at the end of the file name with "/" for directories,
>> "@" for links and "*" for executables.

> I like seeing the file sizes, but I also liked the icons in the
> previous version.  What would you think about just adding file sizes
> to the the icon version?   The only other information ls provides is
> file owner but I don't see that as very useful in an anonymous ftp
> situation.

It would be nice to show the file size under the icon and to use
a multicolumn format when practical. This could all be done with
HTML+ e.g.

    <UL PLAIN WRAP=VERT>
        <LI><A HREF="circus.gif"><FIG SRC="file_icon" ALIGN=TOP>
            <CAPTION>278104</CAPTION>file</FIG>circus.gif</A>
        ...
    </UL>

But this will have to wait until Erik gets some free time :-)

Getting the file size explicitly is perhaps less robust, but as Andy
Norman of angeftp fame is a colleague of mine, I reckon I can beef up
the code to deal with the 15 formats or so of directory listings from
different platforms, e.g. VMS FTP servers produce 3 varieties alone!

Regards,

Dave Raggett