FYI: List of current proposals

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.
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