Referring to hypermail archives at EIT

Kevin Hughes (kevinh@eit.COM)
Sun, 27 Aug 95 01:03:00 PDT

Some folks have suggested that to avoid changing URLs to
hypermail articles all the time, it would be good to refer to
articles using message IDs instead of file names. This is such
a nice idea, I made two hacks: one scans a Web site for hypermail
archives and builds a flat-file database of message IDs (when found),
and the other searches the database and returns the appropriate
article.
So, for now, here is how to refer to hypermailed articles
at EIT:

1) Go to the hypermailed article you wish to reference.
2) View the HTML source and extract the ID from a line
like this:

<!-- id="9504040508.AA02283@avon.declab.usu.edu" -->

It's typically within the top six lines of any hypermailed
article.
3) You can now refer to the article with this type of URL:

http://www.eit.com/msgid/id

The ID in the URL must match *exactly*. So, in this case:

http://www.eit.com/msgid/9504040508.AA02283@avon.declab.usu.edu

...will take you to the appropriate article.

If there is no ID for the article, it can only be pointed to
with a traditional URL.
I intend to make these little C programs available from the
hypermail distribution site (but not... just... yet...). All ID lookups
are available for every archive at EIT, that's www-html, www-talk,
www-vrml, and www-style, and new IDs are indexed daily.

Here are the relevant URLs:

Mailing lists at EIT:
http://www.eit.com/lists/

How to refer to archived articles:
http://www.eit.com/www.lists/refer.html

WWW-Talk and WWW-HTML lists:
http://www.eit.com/www.lists/

WWW-VRML and WWW-Style lists:
http://www.eit.com/www.lists/www.lists.2.html

Hypermail distribution:
http://www.eit.com/software/hypermail/

Have fun with it,

-- Kevin

--
Kevin Hughes * kevinh@eit.com
Enterprise Integration Technologies Webmaster (http://www.eit.com/)
Hypermedia Industrial Designer * Duty now for the future!