Re: Annoucement: Local Browser Execution
"Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@simplon.ics.uci.edu>
To: "Henning G. Schulzrinne" <hgs@research.att.com>
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: Annoucement: Local Browser Execution
In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 15 Dec 1993 08:03:46 EST."
<9312151304.AA13944@dxmint.cern.ch>
Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1993 22:08:44 -0800
From: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@simplon.ics.uci.edu>
Message-id: <9312152208.aa05167@paris.ics.uci.edu>
> ... One of the nicer things
> about URLs is that you don't necessarily know or care whether something
> returned to you has been generated dynamically or exists as a file.
> Conceptually, both are the same: In either case, you provide a
> string that maps into some output, to be returned. For file retrieval,
> the mapping is done by the filesystem, for a shell command it is done
> by some special program. You might even decide to switch between the
> two, e.g., if the range of arguments provided is small enough that
> they can easily be mapped into files.
The one problem with all these conceptual similarities is that it
makes writing a web-roaming robot (spider) very difficult. A spider
(or human) that specifically wants to avoid scripts or dynamically
created documents needs to be able to determine whether or not the
URL points to a script.
Also, there are times when it is better for the browser client to
exec the desired command rather than having some HTTP server
(possibly at a remote site) do the execution.
....Roy Fielding ICS Grad Student, University of California, Irvine USA
(fielding@ics.uci.edu)