Addendum Re: Getting searching to work

Tim Berners-Lee (timbl@www3.cern.ch)
Thu, 28 Jan 93 08:22:58 +0100


Addendum:

Od course, if you hack the C code of httpd, then you can
make the original document immeditaly searchable:

<isindex>
<dl>
<dt><a name=dub href="dubliners.html">Dubliners<dd>by James Joyce
<dt><a name=ulysses href="ulysses.html">Ulysses<dd>by James Joyce
[etc]
<dt>You can give keywords to search the above texts.
</dl>

This involves no extra panels for the user, but involves the
httpd daemon being able to handle a request

GET /document/list?portrait+of+the+artist

The place to sneak it in is in HTRetrieve.c, when the
"keywords" parameter to HTRetrieve(soc,doc,keywords) is not NULL.
The keywords parameter is a space-separated string.
(I talk of version 0.9b at least)

It is of course safer to have compiled servers than shell scripts
from the security point of view. Keep any servers, scripts or
compiled, root-owned and writable only by root!

Tim