Re: Is HTTP necessary??

Brian Smithson (brian@eitech.com)
Mon, 17 May 93 17:14:52 PDT


Oops. I didn't finish the thought before mistakenly delivering the message! :-(
Let me try that again...

"Peter Lister, Cranfield Computer Centre" writes:

> HTML is great, but is HTTP worth it? I'm want practical details, so
> don't send me philosophical waffle or flame me for being a traitor
> to WWW, cos I'm not.

Here's a practical detail, one which pushed me over the edge to setting
up an http server for internal uses. I wanted to be able to refer to
documents (via hyperlinks) which were rooted somewhere, rather than having
to do a lot of messy stuff like "href=../../../foo/bar.html". I found it much
easier to use "href=http://host.domain/foo/bar.html". It can also be
a lot easier to maintain.

One could use ftp instead of http, but http is a bit more permissive about
following symbolic links (e.g. outside of ~ftp, for example).

-Brian