Re: WWW meta indexes (proposal)

Tony Sanders (sanders@bsdi.com)
Mon, 25 Oct 1993 13:57:10 -0500


George Phillips <phillips@cs.ubc.ca> asks:
> Seems a little biased towards HTTP. Any reason why the "Name:" field
> can't be a URL which will give you the host and port number along
> with the access mechanism and a starting point. If we do that,
> then your index format can be used for other WWW servers such
> as gopher or FTP sites.
Sounds like a good idea, the changes have been made to the online
copy. After all I did say:
Constraints:
3) It must allow for meta-indexing other protocols in the future

Name: http://www.bsdi.com:80/
Index: http://www.bsdi.com:80/info/ BSDI and BSD/386 Information
Index: http://www.bsdi.com:80/bsdi-man/ BSD/386 hypertext manual pages
Index: http://www.bsdi.com:80/official_patches/ BSDI 1.0 Official Patches Archive

We need to decide what this means. For example, what does "Name:
http://www.bsdi.com:80/foobar" mean? Do you really want Index: to point
to other services? or should they be indexed separately?

--sanders