Re: Libwww suggestions
Roy T. Fielding (fielding@simplon.ICS.UCI.EDU)
Thu, 25 Aug 1994 16:09:18 -0700
Marc VanHeyningen <mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu> writes:
> A couple of very minor suggestions to the URL parsing routine in wwwurl.pl
> for 0.30;
>
> Some people (idiots) use hostnames of the form foo.bar.edu: with nothing
> following the colon; stripping it off would be nice since browsers will
> tolerate it.
Yes, now that the decision to ignore it has been made among the URI folk,
I will definitely change it. All that is needed is a (\d+) changed to (\d*)
somewhere in wwwurl'parse.
> Similarly, people seem hell-bent on using http://foo.bar.edu as a synonym
> for http://foo.bar.edu/; at some level a null pathname should be replaced
> with a slash. My inclination is to do this at url parse time as well.
> (Some people got mighty confused when MOMspider started generating
> request lines like "HEAD HTTP/1.0" with no path.)
Hmmmmm...I've always been of the opinion that people should be forced
to write decent HTML. I guess what I should do is have wwwhttp'request
send it's own canned redirect message rather than attempting a faulty
HTTP request.
> (I'd include patches, but the changes are so trivial; it's just a matter of
> where they should go.)
Yep. I have a list of minor changes to make this weekend for a new release.
I'd write them here, but they are in my office (I am at home right now).
The only substantial one is that I need to start sending the actual
pre-parsed headers back to the client via $headers (because it is part of
the *headers name, it will not be a visible change to the interface).
This is to support a debug client that needs to see the unadulterated
response headers.
The only problem would be if existing clients already use the scalar
variable $headers -- the change may destroy the contents of that variable.
Would this be a problem for anyone?
Also, if there are any other suggestions that you know of, now would
be a good time to air them.
....Roy Fielding ICS Grad Student, University of California, Irvine USA
(fielding@ics.uci.edu)
<A HREF="http://www.ics.uci.edu/dir/grad/Software/fielding">About Roy</A>