I explained wrong or you misunderstood. Let me give an example. Let's say
there's a directory with filenames like this:
83499A.htm
18132H.htm
BG602A.htm
Meaningless to most users, right? That's what my generated filenames look
like. I'm suggesting that if the client requests a directory list *.htm,
the default would be to a document back that looks something back like
this:
<title>Directory of myhost.mydomain.com/mydirectory/*.htm</title>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://myhost.mydomain.com/mydirectory/83499A.htm">This is the
title of the first file</a>
<li><a href="http://myhost.mydomain.com/mydirectory/18132H.htm">This is the
title of the second file</a>
<li><a href="http://myhost.mydomain.com/mydirectory/BG602A.htm">This is the
title of the last file</a>
</ul>
I'm suggesting that perhaps something like this should be the *default*
behavior, so that the default deals with information that's intended in all
cases to be meaningful to the user. I have no objections to allowing other
behaviors, including returning the file names.
I don't mean to rule out including other directory-related information in
the HTML that's returned, such as creation and mod dates, etc. Perhaps the
default might include those. Maybe have switches to retrieve any and all
portions of the headers.
One of the great benefits, as I mentioned, could be to speed up robots and
spiders, who typically make a series of "GET HEAD" requests. This would
effectively batch all of those together, at the server, instead of
requiring a long series of transactions.
Nick
Multimedia Computing Corp. (strategic consulting)
Campbell, California
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