what finger tags?

Rick Troth (troth@rice.edu)
Fri, 9 Sep 1994 12:07:46 -0500 (CDT)

Hi,

What if finger gateways were sophisticated enough to wrap
the various fields they return in specific tags? I mean, if you
finger troth@is.rice.edu, you'll get (partially)

Login name: troth In real life: Rick Troth

and a typical finger-to-HTML gateway might wrap that in

<pre>Login name: troth In real life: Rick Troth</pre>

What if in addition there were specific tags for login_name
and in_real_life. What should those tags be? I can imagine

Login name: <USER_LOGIN_NAME>troth</USER_LOGIN_NAME>
In real life: <USER_PERSONAL_NAME>Rick Troth
</USER_PERSONAL_NAME>

but those are a bit more verbose than I'd like to get.

There are *numerous* other directory service values that
might also be included. I guess we aren't up to taking on X.500, eh?
Seriously, though, this is something that I'd like to include in *my*
finger gateway, and I'd like to keep in step with everyone else.

Any self respecting WWW browser should quietly ignore tags
that it doesn't recognize. This gives us a nice migration path for
future browsers/clients that might actually use this information.
It would surely help user administration at *this* site. 

-- 
Rick Troth <troth@rice.edu>, Rice University, Information Systems