Quoting from Wilfried Woeber, UniVie/ACOnet's message:
Hi Peter !
=> lookup key. On the other hand I haven't had enough time and expertise => to try to teach a browser about something like => => whois://db-server-FQDN:43/lookup-key = =To my knowledge there are no whois-URLs yet, but you can (ab-)use =gopher-URLs to watch Whois-Entries with your web-browser. =Give it a try with <gopher://whois.ripe.net:43/0WW144>
We actually use it in some situations, but there are two major problems involved:
- this does no longer work for Netscape V2.x on Windows PCs (while it does work on Unix boxes and V1.x an the PC was fine ;-)
- and I think (for good reasons!) the RIPE-NCC is about to discontinue the gopher access to the whois database. It's a fairly limited approach anyway.
Thus we have been looking into alternatives and ways of tricking the web browser into doing things that it wasn't meant for :-)
Maybe I've lost the point in this discussion but.. there's no need to trick a web browser as long as the web server (using some cunning cgi-bin) is able to present whois data in html format... That is the approach we followed. Don't think there is a strict relationship between the WAIS indexing and the CGI-BIN parts of our software. Here in Pisa they run on two different machines... If you don't like, or don't want, the serching flexibility of WAIS because you prefer a simpler whois-style searching, what is needed is a WHOIS-WWW gateway. It could be easily implemented using a part of the CGI-BIN software we have already developed.
Cheers, Wilfried.
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