Re: HTTP HEAD not HTML <HEAD>...</HEAD>

If Al is right (and he usually is), then there could be an argument for a
modification to HTTP that would facilitate the extraction of titles from
HTML head elements, text fields from PNG images, etc. I have not had time
to read through the HTTP specification (I am still working through the
HTML 4.0 draft in my spare moments), but one solution that comes to mind
is a pattern matching scheme. The server would read the file until a
pattern supplied by the client was matched, and then transmit all of the
data up to and including the octets that matched the pattern. This
approach would eliminate the need for the server software to be able to
interpret each particular file format (HTML, PNG, audio file formats,
etc.), since the pattern matching request would be provided by the client
(E.G. "</title>").

Patterns could be regular expressions, although it would probably be
necessary to adopt a more sophisticated technique for handling binary
files.

Received on Thursday, 10 July 1997 23:37:57 UTC