RE: FW: ALTifier

Hi,

You think I should subscribe?  I'm not a member of the W3C and I don't 
think they allow just anybody to join.

Anyway, I've now updated the alt_filter.  I'm afraid I can't copy it to 
another machine, because all the other machines I have access to run 
Unix.  But I'll try and make sure ssb22 is up for the time being (let me 
know when the presentations are).  Rather than get people to check the 
box, you can of course grab the long URL and put it into a link.  Of 
course, if you have a Win32 server and you'd like to run the gateway on 
it then you could (although the downloadable version on accu.org doesn't 
include the code to run alt_filter because this is still rather 
developmental.)

C++ is my native language too, and the gateway is 100% GNU C++.  (I 
didn't use lex to write the HTML parser, because it had to deal with 
broken HTML too.  Instead I used my own classes.)  Can I have a look at 
your source?  I can't guarantee it, but there might be some way of 
putting this together.  Although, I would want to make sure that there 
aren't too many tight interdependencies, so we both have the freedom to 
carry on developing without worrying about treading on each other's 
code.

I'm afraid there's no portable way of getting it to run as a 
long-running web process, though.  But it would certainly make it faster 
to integrate the two C++ programs rather than have one spawn the other 
(and the command shell in between).  Anyway, I'd be worried about the 
security implications of keeping a permanent record of data.  Some 
malicious user's bound to point it at a phoney web page to mislead its 
database, or a massively big web page to fill it up.

One thing I personally find helpful that my gateway does (I mean 
gateways on any machine other than ssb22, eg. on excession.ucam.org) is, 
if there's an image in a link with no text alternative, instead of 
writing out the image's filename, it can write the filename of the 
link's destination, which is usually more meaningful than that of the 
image.  If we were integrating then we'd need to sort out things like 
this (ideally, the user should have the choice).

Regards

-- Silas S Brown, St John's College Cambridge UK http://epona.ucam.org/~ssb22/

"Every kingdom divided against itself comes to desolation, and every city or
 house divided against itself will not stand" - Matthew 12:25

Received on Tuesday, 9 February 1999 10:49:39 UTC