[187] in World Wide Web
[daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU : New WWW/TechInfo gateway from Upenn]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (brlewis@MIT.EDU)
Wed Dec 1 10:43:11 1993
From: brlewis@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 93 10:43:02 -0500
To: www@MIT.EDU
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[0634] daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven Wade Neiterman) TechInfo 12/01/93 10:28 (96 lines)
Subject: New WWW/TechInfo gateway from Upenn
Date: Wed, 01 Dec 93 10:28:59 EST
From: wade@MIT.EDU (Steven Wade Neiterman)
To: techinfo@MIT.EDU
After looking at this new WWW/TechInfo gateway, I thought this was worth
posting to the TechInfo team.
One of the things I liked was that it incorporates functions in TechInfo
within the WWW client (e.g. Mosaic - if this is your choice). For example,
you could issue an outline, GetInfo, path, etc.
One nice feature is that you could perform a GetInfo on a menu item, and
then "click" on the list of keywords that were returned to find all
documents that have the same keyword.
If you have a chance to play with it, you may want to give Linda Murphy
some feedback.
------- Forwarded Message
Return-Path: <murphy@dccs.upenn.edu>
Posted-Date: Mon, 29 Nov 93 17:51:17 -0500
To: timbl@nxoc01.cern.ch, wade@MIT.EDU, thorne@MIT.EDU
Subject: When you feel like playing....maybe you'll try this new program
Reply-To: Linda Murphy <murphy@dccs.upenn.edu>
Cc: smith@pobox.upenn.edu, sheppard@pobox.upenn.edu, murphy@dccs.upenn.edu,
mengwong@pobox.upenn.edu
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 93 17:51:17 -0500
From: murphy@dccs.upenn.edu
X-Mts: smtp
I've re-written the WWW->PennInfo gateway. Tim wrote his version
about a year ago. I wrote this one over the holiday (it' might
be a little buggy still :-)
Try this URL: http://www-penninfo.upenn.edu:1962/
By the way, from a weak and worthless Macintosh :-) you might want to
use http://nisc2.upenn.edu:1962/ instead because there's a bug with
CNAMES in MAC/TCP. (Unless that bug's been fixed).
(I wrote virtually all of the new gateway code from at
home, using a w&w Macintosh over SLIP, NCSA Mosaic, and NCSA Telnet to
the Unix host running the gateway.)
What's new in version 1.2 of the gateway:
0) Each menu & text document now has it's very own title at the top!
1) the gw correctly recognizes and sends GIF images (I'm not sure what
the older version of the gateway did with them),
2) It allows Title and What's New searching (the older gateway
only allowed keyword searching, which is still the default Search),
(Since we don't have Full-text searching on our server, I didn't
put pointers to it in the generated html, but it's minor to
add it to the gateway code).
3) the gw allows you to view an outline of a menu
4) the gw allows you to view the path(s) to an item from the main menu
4) the gw offers 'meta-information' about each item. One key piece of
information that is displayed is the SIZE of the document, which is
quite important to those of us who use SLIP over phone lines from at
home :-). I can see if a document is more than 500 K and decide
not to get it, or to get it and go walk my dog while the download
takes place.
5) In the 'meta-information' screen, you'll see the list of keywords.
If you click on one of the keywords in the list, a search is
triggered, and then you'll see a list of all documents at our TechInfo
server which have the selected keyword as one of their keywords.
TechInfo, in some ways, has a rich set of functions -- and I've
possibly cluttered things up with too many links all over the place.
I'm open to suggestions about how to re-arrange things so that
things are neater and easier to use.
Things that don't work (yet):
1) Telnet documents (not a big deal. There are only two documents
like this in PennInfo)
2) Pointer to all other TechInfo sites on the Internet.
3) Limiting the scope of searches to a specific menu
--lam
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