Ah, reading Nick's message made me notice something I missed the first
time around.
On Fri, 9 Dec 2005, Andreas Bovens wrote:
>> Let's say we have a text file 4meg in size on a URI....
>
> That's indeed a bit of a problem, although you can wonder if you
> really want to offer such a huge page to ANY browser, mobile or not.
In fact, you probably don't. But URLs are addresses of content in
general, not just content for browsers that render HTML. For example,
http://www.mrbill.net/lispbooks/common_lisp_the_language.pdf is a URL
referencing a PDF version of Guy Steele's book, _Common Lisp: The
Language_. The file is 3.8 MB in size; the book is more than a thousand
pages long.
It's darn convenient to be able to download this PDF, drop it on my hard
drive, and be able to refer to this book any time, on-line or off. I can
also easily print a copy, or send off a copy to be printed and bound for
me. (I'd probably just buy this one, but this is very useful for books
that are out of print.)
I'm sure you aren't proposing that one reformat this for the web so that
it can be browsed in 5K-or-less chunks on my keitai.
Here's another example. Grepping through the NetBSD package
system, I find a lot of URLs. Most are of the form,
"ftp://ftp.freesoftware.com/pub/perl/CPAN/authors/id/NEILB/",
but there are plenty of HTTP URLs as well, such as
"http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/Products/Zippy". Browsers never
touch these; a command-line client downloads files from them.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974
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Received on Sat Dec 10 09:44:48 2005