Re: wwwhtml.pl and <plaintext>

Roy T. Fielding (fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU)
Thu, 17 Nov 1994 19:48:56 -0800


Anthony Thyssen <anthony@cit.gu.edu.au> writes:

>    1/ The wwwhtml.pl does not ignore any text after a <PLAINTEXT>
>       html directive. It is an old directive but it is still used
>       as no other directive achieves the same effects as this.
>       Has anyone fixed this or will it be fixed for the next release.

It is hard to "fix" this, since PLAINTEXT is inherently broken.
What should the behavior be?

>    2/ How regular are the releases? Is the next one due?

Very irregular at the moment.  Since there are no serious problems,
and I have a massive amount of other work to do, I am not planning a
new release until sometime in mid-December (i.e. post-IETF and post-paper
deadlines for several conferences).

I have been looking for an apprentice here at UCI to take up the
slack, but there seems to be a lack of perl-literacy among the undergrads.

>    3/ Is a wwwftp.pl package available.

Yes, Jack Shirazi did an alpha-version and it is in the contrib directory

    http://www.ics.uci.edu/WebSoft/libwww-perl/contrib/jshirazi/

>    4/ Why doesn't wwwfile.pl allow put, I thought that would be a obvious
>       thing for it to allow / attempt.

Because, depending on how it is used, PUTing a file could represent
a security hole.  Thus, I did not want to implement it at the time I
wrote wwwfile.pl.  It is probably safe to implement it for most applications,
but not the one I was working on (MOMspider).  If someone does it right,
I'll add it to the library.


......Roy Fielding   ICS Grad Student, University of California, Irvine  USA
                                     <fielding@ics.uci.edu>
                     <URL:http://www.ics.uci.edu/dir/grad/Software/fielding>