Re: URL schemes containing +, -, or .

"William F. Hammond" writes:

| Martin Hamilton <martin@mrrl.lut.ac.uk> writes:
| > ...
| >                    Please let me know if your stuff will go gaga
| > when it sees "whois++://" !
| 
| Are there browsers that handle any "whois" scheme?

This isn't really a browser thing at the moment, though it might be in 
the future.  To these eyes, WHOIS++ would be rather more appealing as 
the query protocol component of the WWW suite than, (say) LDAP, Z39.50, 
or X.500.  Hopefully Netscape will "do" LDAP in a sensible way which 
makes it useful for more than just White Pages type applications.

What is important is that we there be a way of writing referrals (-> 
URLs) for WHOIS++ servers in the Common Indexing Protocol - see 
draft-ietf-find-cip-00.txt.  Better yet if we can do this in such a way 
that it doesn't break deployed code, just on the offchance that it 
really takes off... ;-)

| As the number of schemes that we want to be a part of the Web
| increases, it becomes increasingly unreasonable not to have
| user-configurable external handler applications for the various
| schemes just as most browsers now permit the user to configure
| external viewing applications by mimetype.
| 
| Has anyone actually provided for external handlers?

Chimera ?

| Is anyone thinking about it?

I was just thinking it would be nice to hack this into X Mosaic.  Would 
be a handy addition to the support it already has for proxying 
arbitrary URL schemes.

Received on Monday, 13 May 1996 05:25:40 UTC