FYI: List of current proposals

Antonio_Blasco Bonito wrote:

> Quoting from Wilfried Woeber, UniVie/ACOnet's message:

> >   - 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.

> 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...
... or if the whois-server itself can output the data if queried via a
web browser. The format may be usual text line by line or even HTML if
the server's capabilities are improved accordingly. This does of course not
imply the whois-server has to communicate via http - the whois protocol is
sufficient.
Seeing Wilfried's second remark above I'd like to point out that, although
the "gopher" access method is utilized, the gopher server is not involved.

An additional option '-H' directing the server to output HTML instead of
plain text could be used both ways - either locally on the web-server,
which calls the whois-client via a CGI script or directly from the web
browser. For the latter one would either need to propose and spread
the "whois"-URL access method or encode the option and parameters into
gopher- (or finger-) URLs.
The CGI way of accessing the whois data is probably simpler to implement,
i.e. already available.

-Peter