[5473] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: modular web browser
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Kilburg)
Mon Sep 5 06:47:49 1994
Date: Mon, 5 Sep 1994 12:30:57 +0200
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: john@cephas.ISRI.UNLV.EDU
From: John Kilburg <john@cephas.ISRI.UNLV.EDU>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
>George Phillips <phillips@cs.ubc.ca> said:
>Good stuff. You may want to consider using CGI as your interface
>to protocol handlers. It covers all the information you need in
>environment variables and has ways to handle POST data and the like.
>
>You may say "But CGI is for servers". Yes, it is, but you can look
>at those external protocol handlers as servers. You could handle
>unknown protocols by connecting to an HTTP server and giving it
>the full URL and have it gateway for you. That's done all the
>time by proxy servers. What you've done is cut out the HTTP middleman
>and directly run the gateway. With the HTTP server out of the way,
>CGI logically follows as the interface. Well, it _does_ make sense,
>I may just not be explaining it well.
>
>I've got some code which almost does what you want (except that it's
>tied to a particular URL scheme), look under
>http://www.cs.ubc.ca/doc/world/exec/intro to find it.
Good idea, but I would like to use HTTP because the code is already
in chimera to do it.
It seems like a CGI interface could be put on top of the external
protocol handler for the folks that would like to use CGI.
I'll see if I can con a friend into doing it :)
Unfortunately this causes CGI code to be duplicated if you have
more than one external protocol program.
Does this make any sense?
-john
