[9991] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: URL schemes containing +, -, or .
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Martin Hamilton)
Sat May 18 07:26:00 1996
To: www-talk@w3.org
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 14 May 1996 11:04:34 PDT."
<96May14.110446pdt.2733@golden.parc.xerox.com>
Date: Sat, 18 May 1996 12:21:02 +0100
From: Martin Hamilton <martin@mrrl.lut.ac.uk>
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
Larry Masinter writes:
| > I have an Internet Draft (draft-hamilton-whois-url-00.txt) which
| > specifies a URL format for the WHOIS++ protocol using the scheme
| > "whois." Now, it's been suggested that there really ought to be
| > separate schemes for the old WHOIS protocol, WHOIS++, and RWhois
| > - defined by (respectively) RFCs 954, 1835 and 1714.
|
| Personally, I'd prefer one URL scheme to three. I don't think there
| are clear-cut rules for deciding, though. Are the various WHOIS
| schemes interoperable? And is some of th is obsoleted by LDAP?
Hmm...
Actually, you can use heuristics to infer the protocol, e.g. RWhois
servers should respond with a banner message whose first seven
characters are
%RWhois
and WHOIS++ servers should send a banner message whose first five
characters are
% 220
If the server doesn't return either of these, or hasn't returned
anything at all after some timeout period, it must be speaking WHOIS
(or non-conformant). The downside is the timeout for WHOIS.
These *WHOIS protocols are all "text" based, if you count inclusion of
arbitrary character sets as still being text, whereas LDAP is cut-down
ASN.1/BER - yikes!
