Re: libwww, a different approach #AMMENDMENT
Roy T. Fielding (fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU)
Thu, 16 Mar 1995 03:03:35 -0800
> Although I do not agree that file and mailto are proxy-able
>
> mailto only supplies a mail address which the user process send mail to.
>
> Although thinking about it perhaps I have viewed this wrong in terms of
> GET/PUT.
>
> currently GET-> call a callback to send mail to the address
>
> maybe GET -> return address
> PUT -> sends mail, maybe via proxy
No, you were thinking of it right -- at least, in the same way as mailto
is typically implemented on WWW browsers. Note, however, that mailto can
be proxied through the use of forms:
GET mailto:me HTTP/1.0
sent to the proxy returns an HTML form which acts as a mail application,
with ACTION=POST and a URL on that proxy which acts as a mail gateway.
> OK so I just contradicted myself with mailto but file: is supposed to
> represent
> an access to a file on your local machine therefore there should be no proxy
> required
Unless the client doesn't support file: requests and the proxy is located
on the local machine. We have to keep in mind what a "true" proxy does --
it takes any request (possibly with authentication) and, according to some
internal ruleset, attempts to satisfy the request either directly or by
passing it on to another proxy upstream. Thus, it is reasonable for 10
clients running on a machine to be directly connected to a single proxy,
which handles their requests or passes them to an organization-wide proxy,
which may in turn pass them to a regional proxy, onward to a national
proxy, and then down the chain to the origin server.
The point is that just because we don't forsee any need for file: proxying
does not mean that we should make it impossible -- I'm sure someone will
use it eventually (Hyper-G is built this way). Since allowing file to be
proxied makes no difference to the code (in fact, it simplifies things),
there is no reason why the designers should disallow it.
......Roy Fielding ICS Grad Student, University of California, Irvine USA
<fielding@ics.uci.edu>
<URL:http://www.ics.uci.edu/dir/grad/Software/fielding>