Dear Wilfried, Blasco,

Wilfried Woeber, UniVie/ACOnet writes :

Hi Blasco !

=> - WWW/HTML/HTTP functionality in the DB-SW package and the whois-server => and whois-client => => That's from my point of view part of the item to include/provide => means to register URLs (in some way or another) in the DB objects. => But registering the URL strings itself is not a major problem (we => could use a remarks field for that porpose as an interim => measure - look at spt1-ripe :-), => but the *access* to the objects by way of an http or whois => interface is! I haven't found a trick yet to make my browser => process an object as html code... = =It is anyway needed to reformat the DB object in HTML. That is exactly =what the cgi-bin in our software does. We can cooperate to port =this part of software in a different context (whois ?).

How did you solve that? do you use plain vanilla whois towards the DB and dish out html towards the browser?

The basic obstacle that stopped me to make any progress is to find a way (protocol, port, lookup key transfer mechanism) to query the db and then to convince the browser to read the text as html. The best I managed was gopher and interpretation as text. Not that useful in the end...

I want to do the following (as dicussed with you earlier in a private conversation): Make a 'whois -w' that let the whois program behave as cgi-bin script: The whois server will return you an html formatted document instead of regular plain text objects. It's then very easy to put such a 'whois' program in your cgi-bin directory and here you go... The nice thing about this the unified presentation of objects in a web based context. Furthermore, people can use url's to specified objects in the database. Example: An html document about the escalation procedures for network outages of an ISP can point directly to a 'role:' object in the RIPE database. Shall I add such a feature to my proposal list in addition to the WAIS interface (with a note that the WAIS interface can be enabled quickly with some hacks as proposed by Blasco) ? David K. ---