Re: [9fans] gtk port

["James A. Robinson" <jim.robinson@stanford.edu>]

>
> On Thu, Jun 29, 2000 at 08:41:31PM -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
> > I must disagree here, for example:
> >
> > .../httpd/einstein.ssz.com/index.html
>
> But many sites aren't organized that way. :( The web's metadata format
> is more confused than FTP's.

Yes, in general I think it is a very poor protocol. It is very flexible
about the name and parameters you can use to request a resource, but
doesn't return a name/value indicating the canonical name of the resource
you are retrieving.

The problem, as you point out, is that many sites just aren't organized
like this. If you request

	http://www.sciencemag.org/

You are not getting '/index.html' but '/index.dtl' with 'dtl' being a
homegrown dynamic template language like shtml. Naturally what the browser
sees is straight html (as with shtml), but the problems start to appear if
you want to cache the resource or refer to it by it's resource name.
If you cache it as '/index.html' then you will run into trouble when
you try and and do a 'HEAD /index.html' to see if it has been modified.
Our server will respond that it knows nothing about '/index.html'


Jim