New Internet-Draft: finger URL

IETF URI Working Group
Internet-Draft
draft-ietf-uri-url-finger-00.txt
Expires August 15, 1995

                             finger URL Specification

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Abstract

A new URL scheme, "finger", is defined. It allows client software to
request information from finger servers that conform to RFC 1288.

Description

Many Internet hosts publish information through the finger protocol, as
described in RFC 1288. In order to allow that information to be located
in a standard fashion, a "finger" URL is needed.

The "finger" URL has the form:

     finger:<request>

where <request> is any request that conforms to the query specification
given in RFC 1288. The interpretation of the finger request should be left
to the receiving host.

Clients sending finger queries should never send CR or LF characters.
All requests must be sent to the standard TCP finger port, 79 (decimal). The
client should look for requests that do not conform to RFC 1288 and reject
them.

Encoding

RFC1738 requires that many characters in URLs be encoded. This affects
the finger scheme in that some requests may contain space (" ", ASCII
hex 20) and forward slash ("/", ASCII hex 2F). These characters must be
encoded in the URL following the rules in RFC 1738.

Examples

Typically, a finger URL will be something like:

<finger:nasanews@space.mit.edu>

However, note that RFC 1288 also permits requests such as:

<finger:someuser@host1.bigstate.edu@host2.bigstate.edu>

and:

<finger:%2FW%20someuser@host1.bigstate.edu>

Security

RFC 1288 contains a detailed section on both client and host security that
should be read by anyone implementing clients that allow the finger URL.
Specifically, client software should check for any unsafe characters and
character strings before displaying the results of a query.

Author contact information:

Paul E. Hoffman
Proper Publishing
127 Segre Place
Santa Cruz, CA  95060 USA
Tel: 408-426-6222
phoffman@proper.com

Received on Tuesday, 14 February 1995 17:33:54 UTC