Re: Problem with "~user/file.html"

Paul Phillips (paulp@is.internic.net)
Wed, 16 Feb 1994 18:26:27 --100

Or, execute a script that runs the finger, replaces the newlines with <br>,
and return the output in HTML. Not only does this look nicer, but you
can put anchors and images in your .plan and have them come up. :-)

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On Wed, 16 Feb 1994, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:

> > Hmm.... how does one specify that the data coming back from the finger
> > request is to be interpreted as HTML?
>
> Oh dear. You certainly can't do that. The finger protocol is
> that you send a user name and you get back plain text. If you
> return anything else, you are breaking finger. You can't do
> that to existing protocols. You will have complaints from
> finger client users.
>
> Of course, you could define an enhanced "htfinger" protocol, which had a
> header on the response to say what the data type was coming back,
> or a "gofinger" protocol which had a letter prepended to the
> username to say what data type one should expect... :-)))