Early versions of the WWW developed a reputation as a versatile
and convenient tool for accessing mission-critical data at the European
Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN). Paradoxically the Web tools Tim
Berners-Lee developed were the most successful and were widely regarded as the
best way to access the CERN phone directory. Please note, that the first
successful WWW application was not distribution of published papers it was a
gateway to an existing and important application. Of course, the versatility of
WWW became clearer as the technology spread among high energy physics
institutions and then to the outside world. But is it really an accident that
the Web took off as a gateway to existing information system? I think this is
not an accident and that's why WWW served as a launch pad for several scripting
languages, including Perl, JavaScript, PHP and Python.
...HTTP is useful in its own right, for
example, as a good file-distribution protocol with a number of important
advantages over ftp. This article gives an example how to speak HTTP and get
understood.
... By definition[1], HTTP is a
request/response protocol that exchanges messages in a format similar to that
used by Internet mail (MIME). An HTTP transaction is essentially a remote
procedure call. It is usually a blocking call, although HTTP/1.1 provides for
asynchronous and batch modes. HTTP allows intermediaries (caches, proxies) to
cut into the response-reply chain.
An operation to execute remotely is
expressed in HTTP as an application of a request method to a resource.
Additional parameters, if needed, are communicated via request headers or a
request body. The request body may be an arbitrary octet-stream. The HTTP/1.1
standard defines methods GET, HEAD, POST, PUT,
DELETE, OPTIONS, TRACE, and
CONNECT. A particular server
may accept many others. This extensibility is a rather notable feature of
HTTP. The parties can use not only custom methods but custom request and reply
headers as well. In addition, a client and a server may exchange
meta-information via "name=value" attribute pairs of the standard
"Content-Type:" header.
Most of the HTTP transactions performed every
day are done behind the scenes by browsers, proxies, robots, and servers. Yet
the protocol is so simple that one can easily speak it oneself. The only
requirement is a language or tool that is able to manipulate text strings and
establish TCP connections. Even a simple telnet application may do in a pinch,
which is often useful for debugging. Server-side programming is less
demanding: a servlet or a scriptlet does not need to bother with the network
connectivity, authentication, access restrictions, SSL, and other similar
chores. Server modules or FastCGI give a server-side programmer even more
tools: load-balancing, persistence, database connectivity, etc. This article
demonstrates how to use Perl scripts to speak and respond HTTP directly.
Nikolai Bezroukov
Notes:
Those pages are written by people for whom English is not a
native language. Some amount of grammar and spelling errors
should be expected.
This is a Spartan WHYFF (We Help You For Free) site. It
cannot replace the best teachers and
the
best books.
The site contain some obsolete pages as it develops like a
living tree... Some links on older pages are broken. Please
try to use Google, Open directory, etc. to find a replacement link
(see
HOWTO search the WEB for details).
We would appreciate if you can
mail us a correct link.
"According to an article on New York Times, Microsoft
researchers have discovered
tens of thousands of junk Web pages,
created only to lure search-engine users to advertisements. While most of us
have run across them from time to time, the company researchers have found
the pages are deliberately generated in vast numbers by a small group of
shadowy operators. By following the money trail, Microsoft researchers were
able to track the flow from big-name advertisers to search engine spammers.
Many use Google's blogspot.com to set up spam doorway pages. 'The practice
has proved to be a vexing problem for the major search companies, which
struggle to prevent both spammers and companies specializing in improving
legitimate clients' Web traffic -- a field known as search-engine
optimization -- from undermining their page-ranking systems. Surprisingly,
the researchers noted that the vast bulk of the junk listings was created
from just two Web hosting companies and that as many as 68 percent of the
advertisements sampled were placed by just three advertising syndicators.'
The report is available at
Microsoft Strider Search Ranger project page."
Elsop Webmaster Resource Center
is a comprehensive site of software, site mappers, link validators, trade
associations, computer law, webmaster humor, training, site develpment
services, and more.
internet.com from Mecklermedia can
help you search the list of Internet Service Providers, give you data on all
the browsers available, compare features of web server and Internet apps.
Great "Guide to Electronic Commerce".
Web Design Group's Web
Authoring FAQ (also known as the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html FAQ)
has valuable info on editors, HTML tags and special characters, HTML tips,
search engine submissions, and other common HTML issues. A great starter site
for all HTML authors.
htmlpp is a simple HTML pretty printer, based on nsgmls
and SGMLS.pm. The code is pretty alpha, but gives attractive results for many
HTML docs. Some things, like nested tables, are rendered only passably. Other
deeply-nested structures may render badly as well.
Note that this pretty-printer is oldish, and alpha, and unlikely to be
developed any further. It's not a bad illustration of some of the
possibilities for SGML technology in web authoring. Perhaps someone will take
up the challenge, and build the "right" tool!
Since htmlpp gets its input from nsgmls, invalid
documents should not be expected to work. However, a side effect of this
approach is that minor errors and inconsistencies are actually fixed.
Attribute values are always quoted in the pretty printed version. Characters
like "<", ">" and "&" are converted into the appropriate SGML entities in
attribute values and in document text. End tags are inserted automatically --
which will surprise you if you thought it was legal to imbed <pre> elements
inside <p> elements, for example.
use LWP::Simple;
use HTML::Parse;
use HTML::Entities;
use Text::Wrap;
use Getopt::Long;
[July 14, 2001]
Clean up your Web pages with HTML TIDY is a free utility to fix mistakes
made while editing HTML and to automatically tidy up sloppy editing into nicely
layed out markup.
It also works great on the atrociously hard to read markup
generated by specialized HTML editors and conversion tools, and can help you
identify where you need to pay further attention on making your pages more
accessible to people with disabilities.
Pretty HTML is an easy-to-use program that formats your HTML
Web pages. After processing, your HTML code is neatly arranged, commented,
spaced, and indented, making it much easier to read and maintain. You can also
use Pretty HTML to compress your Web pages by eliminating unnecessary spaces
and carriage returns. Process your Web pages one at a time or batch-format
entire folders in a single operation. Pretty HTML offers a number of options
to ensure that the HTML formatting is done to your liking. To play it extra
safe, you can have the program make backup copies of your originals. Excellent
online help is included.
rpl is a UNIX text replacement utility. It will replace
strings with new strings in multiple text files. It can scan
directories recursively and replace strings in all files
found. Includes source, build script, and man page. Should
work on most flavors of Unix.
replacer.pl
(Perl) A utility to replace all instances of a given text
string with a new text string in all the files in a
single directory.
Treesed -- Freeware
Treesed, a Perl program, is a search/replace tool for lists of files. It can
search for patterns in a list of files, or even a tree of directories with
files.
Treesed searches for pattern1. If pattern2 is supplied pattern1 is replaced
by pattern2. If pattern2 is not supplied treesed just searches. A list of files
can be supplied with the -files parameter. Treesed is also capable of
search/replace in files in subdirectories if you supply the -tree parameter. All
files in the current directory and subdirectories are processed. Always a backup
is made of the original file, with a random numeric suffix.
Search and Replace Search and Replace 98 From: Andromeda HTML Workshop
Version: 2.21 Date: July 19, 1998 File size: 263.2K Downloads: 835 License:
Free Search and Replace 98 is a text search-and-replace tool that can work on
single files or an entire directory of HTML pages. Search and Replace 98 can
read files of up to 512K in size.
BK ReplaceEm BK ReplaceEm From: BK Computer Programming pop Version: 1.7
Date: January 5, 1998 File size: 457K Downloads: 8,538 Freeware
string-replacing utility. At its core, BK ReplaceEm is a text search and
replace program. However, unlike the search and replace functionality of a
standard text editor, BK ReplaceEm is designed to operate on multiple text
files at once. And you need not only perform one search and replace operation
per file--you can set up a list of operations to perform. You can perform
different operations on multiple file groups. You can also specify a backup
file for each file processed, just in case the replace operation doesn't meet
your expectations. This latest version adds whole-word search support and
other enhancements. The file-processing engine has been completely rewritten
in this version.
The problem with /usr/ucb/mail shell escapes is going stay with
us for quite a while: I have found that many web sites run CGI helper scripts
that send data from the network into /usr/ucb/mail, without censoring of, for
example, newline characters embedded in the data.
WebMaker is a GUI HTML Editor for Unix. Main features include a nice GUI
interface, menus, toolbar and dialogs for tag editing, multiple windows support,
HTML 4.0 support, color syntax highlighting, preview with external browser,
ability to filter editor content through any external program that supports
stdin/stdout and KDE integration.
Standard disclaimer:The statements, views and opinions presented on
this web page are those of the author and are not endorsed by, nor do they necessarily
reflect, the opinions of the author present and former employers, SDNP or any other
organization the author may be associated with. We do not warrant the correctness
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