Re: uploading web pages to web server

To begin with, to use PUT (reliably) you need a server that
supports HTTP/1.1.  There are bugs in the HTTP/1.0 protocol
such that PUT cannot be made to work reliably (another words, it
can be made to work much of the time, but will fail randomly at
other times; not a good situation at all)..

In Apache's case, this implies Apache 1.2 or later; either
run Apache 1.3 (recently released), or the release just before that
(there are some bugs that you really don't want to have in a shared
server in 1.2.5 and before).

I haven't personally set it up recently, but as I remember,
what Apache does is invoke a script (something like a CGI script) when
it gets a PUT request.  At that point, you are in control and your
script can be customized to do lots of things.  Included in the
request is the name of the URI to PUT, for example.  You can do some
remarkably magic things from this point (for example, if W3C's web site
sees a PUT, it redirects it to our jigedit server, which implements a
access controlled CVS repository of our web space).  The main W3C server
is Apache; Jigedit is Jigsaw based.

Netscape 4 supports PUT and works in my experience; unfortunately, NS3's 
implementation of PUT is buggy enough to drive you crazy (works just enough
of the time that you may be tempted to try to make it work; don't bother;
it is hopeless in my experience.)  Warn your users off of trying to
use NS3.

Henrik Frystyk has also released a useful PUT tool, which is command line 
on UNIX, and has a little GUI on Windows. See http://www.w3.org/Library/ 
to get these tools.

Unfortunately, the last I knew MS FrontPage was still only supporting
their non-standard POST hack to put files on a server.  I've poked at
MS a few times, to no avail.  Please feel free to bug them about it.
As it is part of HTTP/1.1, they should go ahead and support it...

				- Jim

Received on Thursday, 16 July 1998 09:11:54 UTC