[5250] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: finger url
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Daniel W. Connolly)
Mon Aug 22 17:44:41 1994
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 1994 23:39:20 +0200
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: connolly@hal.com
From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
In message <9408221827.AA12374@math.bu.edu>, Nick Galbreath writes:
>
>Is the finger URL really even needed, except for ease of use? It
>seems to me a 10 line perl CGI script would take care of it with a
>calling of . <a href = "http:/cgi-bin/finger?[name@university.edu]">
You have to remember who the relevant parties in the communication are.
If I'm reading my mail, and somebody says
"For more info about our product, finger info@widget.com"
and all I have is a WWW client, I can't exactly log in to widget.com,
start up an HTTP daemon, and install a CGI-bin script.
I can, however, do an "Open URL" or a goto, or whatever and say:
gopher://widget.com:79/1info
I think some folks might like to be able to use something a little more
straighforward, e.g.:
finger://widget.com/info
But it seems to me that if there were sufficient need for this, somebody
would have implemented it by now.
I believe in descriptive, not prescriptive specifications. Design by
committee is BAD.
Dan
