Re: What's in a .htmld or .htmd?

Bill Bumgarner (bbum@friday.com)
Thu, 26 Jan 95 21:47:06 -0600

# Dan Grillo: I understand your point. However, do you feel the
# ability to use the "index" file separate from the directory is
# a real issue? For one, the file is possibly useless/less useful
# without the information contained within the directory. If an
# application tried to extract the name of the html file from a
# URL (for a "Save" or something), it would presumably extract the
# full "foo.htmld" filename. So the real problem comes down to
# FTP. We don't usually FTP "rtfd" documents--they're usually in
# a tar archive. Similarly, we probably won't usually FTP "htmld"
# documents--they will either be served up via HTTP, or FTPed in
# a tar archive.

Actually -- it's not just a feature for FTP. I use command line tools [htget and family] to grab html documents all the time -- often automatically. For part of this process, I often turn all the relative URLs into absolute URLs -- this means that an html document that may have come from within an htmld is EXTREMELY useful without the information encapsulated/associated with[in] it.

When doing this, it is quite valuable to have a somewhat intelligent filename (IE: something other than "index.html"). Of course, even a non "index.html" filename is not completely useful -- it contains nothing indicative of where the hell the information came from [but that's always been a problem w/distributed systems of any kind].

This may be a can of worms (and, as those that know me have probably figured out, i usually open cans of worms with free abandon), but maybe this particular discussion should be broken into two parts:

- encapsulation of html on the server side via the .htmld paradigm. Either w/"index.html" or "<<>>.htmld/<<>>.html" as the naming paradigm for the main html file.

- intelligent encapsulation/storage/representation of "out-of-context" or "localized" html. That is, some kind of a paradigm that says "if i suck this otherwise thouroughly embedded and dependent on other resources html document back to my local environment", how should i:
- intelligently name the document
- intelligently make the URLs absolute (this really isn't that difficult)

----

As an aside, has anyone given thought to inventing various NeXTSTEP-centric structured comments? Kinda like the postscript's structured comments but geared towards integrating html into the NS environment a bit more seamlessly. I doubt if the net-community-at-large would be willing to adopt it, but considering the enthusiasm with which developers and users are taking on the web as an information provision system within the confines of relatively isolated LANs, it might make sense to give this some thought.

b.bum

Begin forwarded message:

From: Mike Fleming <mikef@hillres22.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: Thu, 26 Jan 95 22:24:33 -0500
To: webstep@mail.xent.caltech.edu
Subject: Re: What's in a .htmld or .htmd?