> It's efficient because you don't have to retrieve an entire document
> using WAIS - only a URL. If you let the WWW client handle the document
> retrieval from the URL, you always have the documents in context - i.e.,
> you always retrieve from the HTTP server, so things like relative links
> work correctly - they don't if you use WAIS to retrieve the document.
> WAIS handles the searches, so your starting point in the web is a
> document that's relevant to your topic of interest.
I agree completely. I don't want to use WAIS for document retrieval.
> It's easy to implement already, and getting easier.
I am not quite sure what you are referring to here...
implementation of WAIS in a WWW client?
What I am after is the best way an information provider can provide a
searcheable index of web-accesible information into the web.
I want the performance and the algorithm of WAIS, but I don't really want to
have to run a WAIS server, and I'd like to have some HTML control of how the
results are displayed. Have a look at the searches in my Mac Archive to see
an example <http://web.nexor.co.uk/mac-archive/welcome.html>. Another
application would be the UU Meta library.
If you generalise this I want to do WWW searches for keywords in a file
with three fields, like:
title keywords URLs(or any HTML)
and get a list like:
<H1>Results</H1>
<H2>A title</H2>(Score: 1000)
...the HTML, with a pointer to some document...
<H2>Another title</H2>...
This would give a general framework to publish indexes, especially if I
can just run a program on this file, and dump the result somewhere under
a HTTP server that would know what todo with it.
> > Can you not achieve the same thing by having waisindex generate an index
> > of a file with titles, keywords and URL's, and have a command line WAIS
> > client called from the HTTP server, or compiled into the HTTPserver do
> > the lookups? This would eliminate the need for the WAIS protocol, and in
>
> You probably could, but this seems to require less code hacking. It's
> not a hard thing to do - it's a clever thing ;-)
If there is an easy way to do the above I'd love to hear it.
-- Martijn
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