Squeak Wiki

Some description of Swiki at

More at

http://www.cc.gatech.edu ... ws/examples.html

DaveHarris reports: None of the pages at http://c2.com:8080/ start with an <HTML> tag. I'm told this prevents Netscape from viewing them.

TomStambaugh replies: Those sites work fine for me, I'm using ?NetscapeCommunicator 4.02. I think there's a different mechanism at work here. The ":8080" suffix of the domain name identifies a "port" that your ISP may not allow you to communicate with. I'm under the impression (probably woefully inaccurate) that this is some sort of security "feature" of the internet protocols. In any case, I think you'll find that you are unable to connect to *any* URL that specifies ":8080" as its port, regardless of the page contents.

Oh, and by the way...the page whose url is "http://c2.com:8080/" begins with the following text:

 <head>
 <title> Welcome Visitors</title>
 </head>
 <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000" link="#ff1707">
 ...

in comparison to the beginning of "http://c2.com/cgi/wikibase?RecentChanges", which contains:

 <head><title>RecentChanges</title></head>
 <body><h1><img src="">
 <a href="http://c2.com/cgi/wikiba ... ch=RecentChanges">RecentChanges</a></h1>
 </form>
 ...

According to the "Page Info" supplied by Netscape, the two URLs are the same (each has File MIME Type: text/html, for instance).

I hope this helps.

DaveHarris says: OK. I recommended the Squeak site to someone on Usenet, and they said they couldn't access it and blamed the HTML. I don't use Netscape myself; I just checked that the tags were missing before reporting it. I'll tell them to read this page. Is there a good reason to omit the <HTML> tag?

Peter Simons says: Hi, I am the one who reported the problem in the first place. I am not sure what triggers the problem, but it is -not- the effect Tom describes, I have full IP access and am not limited to any ports.

I have tested this again and I am unable to get http://c2.com:8080/ with my Netscape 3.1 under NetBSD/i386 Unix. All I see is "Document contains no data". One idea I have is that either the Squid proxy or the Junkbuster proxy, both of which I am using, filter the page. But the problems remains: I can access them.

Whether there's any relation between my problem and the missing <html> tag is a mood point in my humble opinion, though. The <html> tag is clearly required by the standards and should be inserted. Even if Netscape Communicator has no problem without <html>, other browsers might have, and limiting the visibility of your pages flatly contradicts the idea of a web server. --peter

So why hasn't someone added the <html> tag to HandleBrowse?

The server at http://c2.com:8080/ uses the 0.9 subset of the http 1.0 protocol. This is legit, but unusual. I've noticed that browsers vary in their ability to make sense of html pages when transmitted using the subset. Also, I'm told AOL users are unable to access servers running on ports other than 80. Can this be true? -- WardCunningham

Last edited January 13, 1998
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