Mailing List Archive

At 12:54 PM 9/18/95 -0500, you wrote:
>I was playing around with the Alpha release of the HotJava
>browser this weekend. It seems that the current release of this
>code requires a recognizable extension on image files. In
>directories that I am depending on Multiviews to server the
>correct file, and thus have not added the extension to the file
>reference, the browser will serve a broken image.
>
>This thing is far from being publically consumable. Hopefully they will
>rethink this. Any file referenced with an "http:" seemed to be
>fine without an extension as long as it was not an image....

I know there is either an alpha, or beta release of HJ for linux, does
anyone know where I can either find the source, or source+bin?

<Aram>
--
Aram W. Mirzadeh, MIS Manager, Qosina Corporation
http://www.qosina.com/~awm/, awm@qosina.com
Apache httpd server team http://www.apache.org

FWIW, the interpretation of what's going on here really depends on what
Accept: headers HotJava is sending. If it's just sending "Accept: */*",
or nothing at all, then Apache could very well be shipping back something
like a jpeg variant, which HotJava legitimately can't handle (it only
does gif, at least in the alpha versions). I'd be really surprised if
it actually needed a file extension, though...

rst

> I was playing around with the Alpha release of the HotJava
> browser this weekend. It seems that the current release of this
> code requires a recognizable extension on image files. In
> directories that I am depending on Multiviews to server the
> correct file, and thus have not added the extension to the file
> reference, the browser will serve a broken image.
>
> This thing is far from being publically consumable. Hopefully they will
> rethink this. Any file referenced with an "http:" seemed to be
> fine without an extension as long as it was not an image....

that sounds like a dumb mistake by the hojava developers. Reliance
on file extensions is a disaster waiting to happen.

I have to tell users of xxx.lanl.gov all the time that URLs are
not files, they are references to unknown objects. They keep asking,
why we don't put .ps.gz on the end of our "filenames". Doh !

BTW, Rob McCool's ambiguous comments about netscape & java sounded
promising.

rob

Aram W. Mirzadeh writes:

> I know there is either an alpha, or beta release of HJ for linux, does
> anyone know where I can either find the source, or source+bin?

I dont recall that they actually finished the browser part, but the
interpreter was done. Check the java porting lists page at
http://java.sun.com/Mail/external_lists.html. It was also based on
HotJava alpha2, not alpha3.

--
Ryan L. Watkins email: vamp@dnx.com
HTML Hacker / System Admin url: http://www.dnx.com/vamp/vamp.html
Dimension X, Inc. phone: 415.296.0100

> FWIW, the interpretation of what's going on here really depends on what
> Accept: headers HotJava is sending. If it's just sending "Accept: */*",
> or nothing at all, then Apache could very well be shipping back something
> like a jpeg variant, which HotJava legitimately can't handle (it only
> does gif, at least in the alpha versions). I'd be really surprised if
> it actually needed a file extension, though...
>
> rst

A little more info...

The browser is sending the following Accept: header

Accept: text/html,image/gif,*,q=.2,*/*,q=.2

In the cases where it failed to load an image, there was no other
variant besides a .gif. I've gotten in the habit of writing the
HTML to request *most* files without an extension so that they
could be changed rather painlessly.

What's the effect of the single '*'?

Could someone give me a server interpretation of this?

>The browser is sending the following Accept: header
>
>Accept: text/html,image/gif,*,q=.2,*/*,q=.2
>
>In the cases where it failed to load an image, there was no other
>variant besides a .gif. I've gotten in the habit of writing the
>HTML to request *most* files without an extension so that they
>could be changed rather painlessly.
>
>What's the effect of the single '*'?
>
>Could someone give me a server interpretation of this?

Gack! Puke. Splat.

That's about the only interpretation possible.

....Roy