Re: what finger tags?

Marc VanHeyningen (mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu)
Fri, 9 Sep 1994 20:13:21 +0200

> What if finger gateways were sophisticated enough to wrap
> the various fields they return in specific tags? I mean, if you
> finger troth@is.rice.edu, you'll get (partially)
>
> Login name: troth In real life: Rick Troth
>
> and a typical finger-to-HTML gateway might wrap that in
>
> <pre>Login name: troth In real life: Rick Troth</pre>
>
> What if in addition there were specific tags for login_name
> and in_real_life. What should those tags be? I can imagine

Since the finger protocol doesn't specify much of anything about what
the format of the response should be, any such conversion by a gateway
would have to be heuristic and not necessarily portable to other finger
servers. In general, it's probably better to convert to a real directory
service for this kind of thing and leave finger for it's current use.

- Marc