Re: Geography (Was: Re: What this list is for)

> > drafthttp://www.w3.org/member/WWW/TR/WD-logfile.html
> Yes. Tried to look at your draft, but it was password-protected.

This seems to be a recent change. I've looked at it in the past -
often enough to have a server logging it and have fixed my simple
analysis tool to use it.

You can get a flat text copy from your favorite internet-drafts as
draft-ietf-http-logfile-00.txt. There's a copy in
ftp.phone.net:/pub/IETF/drafts, but that server is currently swamped.

> And while we're waiting, some food for thought: It would be very useful
> from a marketing point of view to log browser georgraphy, i.e., the city
> of origin.

There's a hook for application-specific values in place already. The
format includes a line stating what fields are in the file so that
analysis programs can use them, ignore them, or complain that
something it thinks is critical is missing.

There isn't much on what format those fields have, though. I suspect
we'll want to add that. I.e.:

x-date-	-> formated as date
x-time-	-> formated as hh:MM[:SS[.S]]
x-number- -> is an integer (or a float)?
x(name) -> formatted as a string.

At the bare minimum, an analysis tool needs to know whether a field is
whitespace-terminated or quoted. Mine assumes that fields with a "("
in the name are quoted.

> So why should this be in the log rather than in some higher-level
> demographic mechanism? In order to ensure its universality. Where does
> the geographic information come from? Perhaps a one-time browser setting.
> Perhaps a more dynamic mechanism. The trick would be to ensure consistent
> identification of the location.

Doing that is outside the scope of this list. As a one-time browser
setting, it belongs to http.

	<mike

Received on Saturday, 23 March 1996 14:06:51 UTC