FYI: List of current proposals

Quoting from Wilfried Woeber, UniVie/ACOnet's message:
> 
>   Hi Peter !
> 
> =>   lookup key. On the other hand I haven't had enough time and expertise
> =>   to try to teach a browser about something like
> => 
> =>   	whois://db-server-FQDN:43/lookup-key
> =
> =To my knowledge there are no whois-URLs yet, but you can (ab-)use
> =gopher-URLs to watch Whois-Entries with your web-browser.
> =Give it a try with <gopher://whois.ripe.net:43/0WW144>
> 
>   We actually use it in some situations, but there are two major problems
>   involved:
>   
>   - this does no longer work for Netscape V2.x on Windows PCs 
>     (while it does work on Unix boxes and V1.x an the PC was fine ;-)
>     
>   - and I think (for good reasons!) the RIPE-NCC is about to discontinue
>     the gopher access to the whois database. It's a fairly limited
>     approach anyway.
>     
>   Thus we have been looking into alternatives and ways of tricking the
>   web browser into doing things that it wasn't meant for :-)

Maybe I've lost the point in this discussion but..

there's no need to trick a web browser as long as the web server (using
some cunning cgi-bin) is able to present whois data in html format...

That is the approach we followed. Don't think there is a strict
relationship between the WAIS indexing and the CGI-BIN parts of our
software. Here in Pisa they run on two different machines...

If you don't like, or don't want, the serching flexibility of WAIS
because you prefer a simpler whois-style searching, what is needed
is a WHOIS-WWW gateway. It could be easily implemented using
a part of the CGI-BIN software we have already developed.

>   
>   Cheers,
>   Wilfried.
> 

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