Re: Annoucement: Local Browser Execution
Roy T. Fielding (fielding@simplon.ics.uci.edu)
Wed, 15 Dec 1993 22:08:44 -0800
> ... One of the nicer things
> about URLs is that you don't necessarily know or care whether something
> returned to you has been generated dynamically or exists as a file.
> Conceptually, both are the same: In either case, you provide a
> string that maps into some output, to be returned. For file retrieval,
> the mapping is done by the filesystem, for a shell command it is done
> by some special program. You might even decide to switch between the
> two, e.g., if the range of arguments provided is small enough that
> they can easily be mapped into files.
The one problem with all these conceptual similarities is that it
makes writing a web-roaming robot (spider) very difficult. A spider
(or human) that specifically wants to avoid scripts or dynamically
created documents needs to be able to determine whether or not the
URL points to a script.
Also, there are times when it is better for the browser client to
exec the desired command rather than having some HTTP server
(possibly at a remote site) do the execution.
....Roy Fielding ICS Grad Student, University of California, Irvine USA
(fielding@ics.uci.edu)