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st: web access to files

From   Christopher Baum <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   st: web access to files
Date   Wed, 21 May 2003 07:18:17 -0400
Kaleb wrote

Primary reason for this is for the
newer demand of having so many more files, directories, etc all on the web
for easier access. This may be the first advantage of using WinXP (& unix)
over Win2K and previous versions as it recognizes that files on the web are
like files on your network and don't require "http:" prefix.

This is an OS-specific issue -- the notion that the web is merely an extension of your machine's accessible filespace -- and assuredly does NOT apply to Unix, Linux, MacOS X, etc. (Even the WebDAV protocol, which allows read and write access to "web servers" -- e.g. Apple's iDisk -- still appears to rely on the http (or https) prefix). Whether it is a good idea or not (I can see a vast potential for novice users' confusion), it is certainly not a general feature of operating systems in use today, so should not drive packages' development.

I agree with Alan -- one can get many responses from a properly-configured web server that include a positive number of bytes, but are not what you thought was there. E.g.

$ curl http://www.stata.com/nexistepas.txt > kaleb

yields a file, all right:

$ more kaleb
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>302 Found</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Found</h1>
<p>The document has moved <a href="http://www.stata.com/error/404.html">here</a>
.</p>
<hr />
<address>Apache/2.0.45 (Unix) Server at www.stata.com Port 80</address>
</body></html>

So what should we conclude, ye philosophers out there, about the existence of the file I requested from www.stata.com? It would seem that one would have to "read" (or at least mechanically interpret) the contents of the result file to see if they make any sense. I don't see that as a great advantage of being able to confirm the existence of a remote file.

Kit
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