[sword-devel] HTTP Transport support (was: Remote Module Repository Wiki)

[Troy A. Griffitts]

On 11/06/2010 04:36 AM, Nic Carter wrote:

> I initially submitted a patch for HTTP parsing, but it only
> works for CrossWire and not for the Bible.org nor for the Xiphos
> repos, and I have no intention of modifying the parsing code even
> more in order to try to support more web servers!

:) thanks for the patch!  Yeah, surprisingly even FTP directory parsing
is painful.  Even libCURL doesn't have an FTP directory listing parse
function.  I couldn't believe that when I wrote the FTP code!  We found
a portable library call ftpparse which parses directory listings for us.
 When doing the HTTP transport, I was hopeful we might find an
httpdirparse or something :)  But no such luck, as of yet.

We were talking on #sword the other day about how odd it is that there
is no w3c standard for the obvious use case:

Browse a hierarchy of folders+resources and retrieve some.

I brought this up with a frequent member of w3c committees and he
suggested we develop a silly stupid minimal schema to represent a
resource tree and a) submit it for w3c approval, and b) submit updates
for Apache and IIS to update their Folder Index listings to comply to
the proposal.  e.g., something like,

<?stylesheet href="apache_look_and_feel.css"?>
<folder name="My Documents">
  <resource
    type="file" mimetype="application/msword" name="War Of the Worlds.doc"/>
</folder>

Then, end users wouldn't notice a difference, and we could have a
standard to easily parse.  As always, you know who is always in the
details: attributes for permissions, mtime...; do you make the whole
subdirectory hierarchy available from a directory request, or just the
immediate children...

Anyway, we can dream of a bold new Internet where everything is
standardized and straightforward for developers... :)  ahhhhh.


Troy